The Nation Newspaper

Category: Yomi Odunuga

  • Let’s give Stella her treated toys, please!

    Let’s give Stella her treated toys, please!

    With the way news breaks in Nigeria these days, there are a thousand and one things to occupy one’s mind other than the fading fable of a minister and her fanciful but expensive toys. Yet, certain events cannot be simply wished away no matter how hard one tries. One of such is the Oduahgate story which enjoyed some weeks of media blitz before receding into the usual basket of irrelevance. Here in Nigeria, problems or scandals unfold in rapid succession. Asked if he had received the report of the three-man presidential investigative committee on the controversial purchase of two armoured cars by an agency under the Ministry of Aviation, President Goodluck Jonathan dismissed the receipt of the report with a wave of the hand. He offered no clue on the fate that may befall the report. But one can hazard a guess if his body language was anything to go by. Without much ado, one had accepted the fact that it would go the way of many others lying waste in dingy wardrobes in government offices. One had expected a presidential roar that would annoyingly give Sister Stella Oduah a pat on the back for operating within the realm of decency and treading the path of ‘doing the needful’, by strongly warning the agency that doled out N225m for two armoured BMW cars and more than N400m for assorted ‘operational vehicles’ in a transaction dripping with stagnant fraud!

     In a country where nothing – not even the daily harvest of blood – shocks or fires anyone into righteous rage, why should any right-thinking person shudder at the levity with which the leadership treats issues of humongous pillage of our collective patrimony. After all, gross impunity has long been adopted as a philosophy for our VIPs to live by. Each day pops up different challenges such that no one seems to have the time to dwell on the scandals of yesterday. We are already overwhelmed by the clear and present dangers facing us that we conveniently wish yesterday farewell even when we know it will haunt us in the nearest future. In truth, one had thought that Oduahgate, in spite of the pomp and panache with which it was celebrated by the media, had gone the usual way, like so many others. The odds were, in the main, oddly stacked against those asking for the minister’s sack. One cannot imagine how dull a meeting of the Federal Executive Council would have been without her magical charm and sensuous gait! That is all some need to send adrenaline pumping in the State House, Abuja.

    As should be expected, the House of Representatives burst into riotous rage but it yielded nothing but a resounding silence from the powers that be. The Senate did not need to offer any apology on the matter when it reversed itself by refusing to invite the minister for questioning over the car purchase. For now, no one knows the cost of that folly as rumour of financial inducement spreads like wild fire in drinking parlours and car parks. With that unfortunate template, it did not take time for the once topical issue to disappear from the front pages into innocuous spaces of inside pages. It was gradually fading into the dustbin of our unenviable history of endless scam, scandal and shamelessness. Who cares about a minor ministerial infraction when others are busy looting billions without giving a hoot about the suffering millions living on less than N166 per day. In case you don’t know, that is how cheap our naira is to one American dollar in a country where pure water suppliers now own private jets!

     It’s not as if those who know how the cookie crumbles had not told us to be wary of placing high hopes on a presidential roar over Oduahgate. But we ignored them knowing that Jonathan has consistently insisted that, in the fight against corruption, there are no sacred cows as he would bring the full weight of his office and that of the anti-corruption agencies to bear on culprits. Or is it a case of applying the right sophistry at the right time? Truth be told, Oduahgate should be the least headache for a President with much heartache from so many sources. There is, for example, the unresolved face-off with striking Academic Staff Union of Universities which recently claimed the life of Prof. Festus Iyayi while the doors of most tertiary institutions have remained closed in the last four months; there is the uproar over the unrestrained looting that goes on in high places daily; there is the crisis of confidence over the real status of an economy that is short on cash but still claims to be healthy; there is disquiet over the state of the power sector in spite of its privatisation to DISCOS, GENCOS and all sorts; and, above all, there is a President who is engaged in a feisty battle for his political future within and outside his political party, the Peoples Democratic Party. Add that to the insecurity challenges that confront this Presidency daily without any sign of effective resolution and you’ll wonder why the fedora still sits comfortably on his head!

     As a patriot, it is Knucklehead’s candid opinion that the huge burden on the President’s lean shoulders can be drastically reduced if certain proactive steps are taken. With this, the President would have ample time to focus on matters of urgent national importance like insecurity and the wave of political crises that could make or mar his future. Chief among this is the need to allow the country’s Aviation Minister, Stella Oduah, to take possession of the two armoured vehicles which she said were bought by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority as operational vehicles for ‘foreign aviation experts’ visiting Nigeria. Okay, forget the howler by her media assistant, Joe Obi, that she needed the vehicles to protect herself against the bullets of enemies who continually threaten her life for the unparalleled transformation of the aviation industry. As at that time,, the minister said Obi was talking from a position of ignorance as he was not properly briefed or debriefed as the case may be.

     Today, no other special Nigerian deserves the full protection of the state than Oduah, going by media reports, and as confirmed by Obi, that her Escalade saloon car came under enemy fire last Saturday night somewhere in Maitama, Abuja. Though we were not told if the luxury car was treated (i.e. bullet-proof), we celebrate the fact that the ‘gunmen were ignorant that Oduah was not in the car as at the time of the attack!’ Good enough, the driver of the car was said to have equally escaped the assassin’s bullet while the police said they discovered a ‘metallic object’ inside the car and investigations are ongoing. Praise God! What would we be saying if the enemy’s metallic object had hit its target? Wouldn’t we be blaming ourselves for heckling over the propriety of buying additional armoured cars for the safety of the hardworking lady instead of opening the nation’s vault for her comfort going by the nature of her job? Even Obi can now heave a sigh of relief as he now talks from a position knowledge with hard facts! Yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

     And when one had thought that well-meaning Nigerians should be rallying our women to take to the streets (like they did during her trial), demanding the immediate release of the armoured cars for the minister’s use, some yamheads are busy raising questions on the veracity of the assassination story. They wondered why it took the minister’s camp more than 48 hours to report the incident to the Mabushi police station which is only about ten minutes’ drive away from the alleged spot of the attack. Is there a time limit to when one can report attempted criminal activity to the relevant authorities? They claimed to have ‘smelt a rat’ or outright conspiracy theory in reporting an assassination attempt of 10:00pm on Saturday on Monday at 5:35pm. If they like, let them smell pancake! How does that affect them anyway? They were curious to see the car and the metallic object that was ‘discovered’ by the police. They said the story might as well be a decoy, to justify Obi’s justification for the purchase of the cars for his principal even if another agency had earlier bought two for her. Oh, what illogic!

     So, what’s Knucklehead’s own in this matter? It is very simple. There is no need for the melodrama. We may not like Stella Oduah’s face but we sure wouldn’t want her dead for daring to offer her services to the nation. With the reported mindless looting going on around us, it’s pointless expending energy on a deed which no one is prepared to undo. We do not need the services of a shrink to know why the case is taking eternity to resolve. Unfortunately, it is an unnecessary distraction for a President with an abysmal record as a crisis manager. Since he needs all the wisdom he can muster to save himself from what is apparently a self-inflicted misery, the laughable drama of last Saturday’s attempt on the life of his favourite minister shouldn’t be that difficult to handle. The solution is just by the corner – avail Stella the opportunity of having her precious armoured toys back and move on with tackling serious matters of national importance. And if people raise eyebrows as they sure would, he can always feign ignorance or tell them that when the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Sen. Bala Mohammed, asked Abuja residents to embrace the culture of riding bicycles to the workplace, it was not meant to be a joke for the expensive ears of politically exposed persons! Ordinary citizens can have bicycles but an exalted one like Stella needs more of such costly bullet-proof toys to get her groove back. The time to avail her niceties of such magnitude couldn’t have come at a better time than now! Let’s do the needful before it’s too late!

  • Anambra: An augury of coming perils?

    Anambra: An augury of coming perils?

    It is no longer news that the November 16 gubernatorial election in Anambra State was declared inconclusive by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) – Nigeria’s increasingly controversial electoral umpire. The ‘inconclusiveness’ of the exercise was rather a modest way of giving a modicum of credibility to a charade wrapped up as an election. Evidently, the entire process was skewed against the delivery of a free, fair and credible poll. Now, that may be a difficult pill for the eggheads in INEC to swallow but the sickening truth is that it was, yet again, a shambolic outing for the electoral body. It’s simplistic to think that a resort to the conduct of supplementary election can cover up the shenanigan or assuage our fears about INEC’s preparedness for the 2015 general election. If Anambra were to be a litmus test for INEC in the build-up to the 2015 general election, then a lot still needs to be done for Nigeria to get out of this slimy puddle. For now, we are on a one-way road to gloom and anarchy.

     When we blame INEC for the shoddy job it did in Anambra, it is not because we are oblivious of the deadly antics of politicians. Naturally, we knew there would be sour losers. We were not expecting whoever emerges as winner to be magnanimous in victory and neither do we anticipate a friendly embrace from the losers. All we had hoped for in that election was for INEC to live above the fray and give the Anambra voters a credible cause to cheer. We never thought that with over 12,000 INEC officials including its Chairman, Prof. AttahiruJega, 21 commissioners and 15 Resident Electoral Commissioners, 28,000 policemen led by a Deputy Inspector General, thousands of security and paramilitary officials and hundreds of observers, we would be regaled with the same old story of ballot paper stuffing, ballot box snatching, late arrival of electoral materials, missing names in voter registers, killings, protests and official sabotage. We had thought that the umpire in that crucial poll would have effectively plugged most of the holes that were so evident, even to the blind. Sadly, the populace rode on INEC’s promises with high expectations, only to be brought low to a disappointing nadir. Pity!

    I am sure most Nigerians understand the triumphalism displayed by the Chairman of the All Nigerian Grand Alliance, Chief Victor Umeh, who declared that INEC performed “excellently well’ and should be commended for the conduct of a free, fair and credible poll in Anambra. For him, it doesn’t matter if thousands of voters were disenfranchised. It is not his business if a particular candidate had cried foul over what he suspected to be a deliberate attempt to exclude voters in his stronghold from exercising their right. Why should it bother Umeh if most of the INEC-authorised observers had declared the conduct as a sham? To him, it was just enough that his party’s candidate is heading for victory. Maybe he only sees four more years of control over the state treasury that accounts for fat cat party chieftains’ robustness. Every other thing means nothing! The people? Do they really matter? But then, didn’t the system give room for such vacuous triumphalism?

    The other three influential candidates among the 23 individuals that participated in the poll are no less culpable. Perhaps, they started making the right noise at the wrong time. If we agree that the Peoples Democratic Party shot itself in the foot with the ping pong game it was playing with potential candidates who wrestled one injunction after the other at the courts, we really can’t understand how Chris Ngige of the All Progressives Congress and IfeanyiUbah of the Labour Party came to the conclusion that a populist folk image and loads of money were enough to win elections. In these days, even exit polls, no matter how scientifically verified, have proved to be unreliable for accurate predictions in this clime. And so, we had expected them to see the warning signals and make issues out of them with a view to drawing the attention of the relevant authorities to effecting corrections. Now, Anambra is at a crossroads. Unfortunately, the failure in Anambra sends very wrong signals about the 2015 general elections.

    Should the supplementary election fail to douse the tension in Anambra, INEC stands to be the greatest loser in spite of the efforts Jega claimed to have put into the poll. It is one thing to hand over the Electoral Officer that ‘sabotaged’ early voting in Idemili North and South to the police, it is another thing to get to the root of the travesty. Why, in the first place, should it happen in the stronghold of one of the prominent contenders for the office? Is it true that some security agents abandoned their responsibility and instead became emergency thumb printing agents while INEC officials looked the other way? Is it true that voter registers were muddled up, leading to voter apathy? Does Jega’sINEC truly believe that there was substantial compliance with the Electoral Act? And if that were to be the case, then do we take it that INEC is not walking into the 2015 general elections like a dim-sighted giant?

    Many Nigerians have called for an outright cancellation but that suggestion seems not to go well with INEC and those who thought being declared winner in an electoral heist is cool. Some have even accused others of meddling in an election that should be strictly for Igbo people. We continue to go round in circles while the rot deepens. Going by the figures released by INEC, it is clear that a supplementary election will be a waste of time. The election was bungled ab-initio and patching its outcome on the excuse that INEC has no power to cancel a failed electoral process is hogwash. When an election is bereft of integrity and credibility, reason demands that it should not be allowed to stand. That is simple common sense. In any case, since the ruling party in the state believes that none of the candidates in the other parties has the capacity to oust it even if the election were to be repeated 40 times, why should it be afraid of the conduct of a fresh election in which all the loopholes can be plugged?

    With the time at its disposal and the liberty it has to fix the date for what has become a crucial gubernatorial election in Anambra State, INEC has simply missed the opportunity to strengthen confidence in its ability to move away from a long-existing pattern of rancorous elections. And for those who would rather label certain category of Nigerians as ‘outsiders’ for daring to insist on strict adherence to democratic ethos, need we remind them that Anambra State is not an isolated island outside the bigger picture called Nigeria? Or do we take it that they only wear that toga of patriotism when playing politics with the “deportation” of indigenes of the state only to realise how wrong it was for ‘outsiders’ to condemn the joke of an election in which a ruling national party is prepared to leave its candidate in the sun to dry? Is this the type of politics that will break the bounds of deceit and mutual suspicion that have tied the nation down to the tethers? Is this the best way of moving forward to 2015?

    We may be crying more than the bereaved on this matter but we sure know when a nation is eerily progressing in error. Certainly what INEC is cooking in Anambra spells an ominous omen for what it is capable of foisting on the populace in 2015 if it does not retrace its steps from when it started going wrong. Will INEC stand up to be counted as 2015 draws near?

  • For the murdered literary icon…

    For the murdered literary icon…

    In a country where what was once a voracious reading culture steadily reclines to the back seat of academic docility and where its youth now employ short codes to replace simple words of communication, it is not shocking that many young Nigerians of today knew little or nothing about his place in Nigeria’s literary and academic spheres. To most of them, Festus Iyayi could be just another name. Maybe he was one of those troublesome professors sounding trenchant alarm bells in our raped and abused institutions of learning where students now generally go through tough times while the ‘smart’ ones get by with bodily and material bribes, euphemistically referred to as ‘sorting’. Those who have not encountered his works, the depth of his writings, the engaging characters he brings to life and his belief that life could offer us a better bargain if we conform to certain basic principles may not know what the nation has lost in the tragic death of Prof. Festus Iyayi on the Lokoja/Abuja road. It is an irony that he had to be violently cut off from Mother Earth in a quest for peace in the academia. It is troubling, even if not strange, that he was the latest victim of what he had battled throughout his life—the arrogance of power and executive recklessness. The story of his life and its inspiring activism ended tragically on one of our numerous famished roads that daily suck the blood of Nigerians.

    Yet, the Kogi State government would have done Nigeria’s mourning academia a world of good by maintaining an undignified silence instead of its senseless and insensitive efforts at twisting the story of the crash. But for the forthrightness of the Federal Road Safety Commission’s Sector Commander in the state, Mr.OlakunleMotajo, who was unequivocal in tracing the cause of the fatal crash to “wrongful overtaking” by the driver of the Toyota Hilux in Governor Idris Wada’s convoy, the government would have effectively succeeded in shifting the blame on the ‘recklessness’ of the driver conveying the late Iyayi and his injured colleagues to Kano for the National Executive Council meeting of the Academic a Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). It is, to say the least; reckless and inhumane of the media mindersof Col. Wada to viciously issue a statement within a few hours after the crash, criminally twisting the episodic rendering of what was clearly a state murder of one of the nation’s best. In saner climes, all the persons involved in the drafting of that soulless statement would have been grilled by the relevant authorities. For example, what message were they trying to pass across in blubbering that Wada’s convoy was on a “speed of 80 kilometres” at the time of the crash? How did the writers of the pachydermatous statement arrive at the conclusion that it was the bus that “collided” with the escort van? And if we were to believe that that was the case, why should Wada bother himself with ordering an investigation in a case where his men were convinced of the culpability of the other party? Were they questioning the professional competence of Motajo and his team who were on the ground or were they playing the silly game of covering the butt of their paymaster whose official convoy has a record of reckless road behaviour and fatal crashes? Well, we now know the butt of this tragic joke!

    Perhaps, like many others who may be reading of Iyayi’s accomplishments after his demise, maybe the brigands in power need to be told that there are certain things that cannot be waved off. Left for them, Iyayi’s death couldn’t have been in any way different from the unreported case of the poor pregnant woman who was crushed to death by the governor’s convoy at Ganaja Junction in Lokoja some months back or that of his ADC in which Wada escaped by a whiskers. Maybe his convoy is becoming used to maiming, destroying, killing and trampling on the rights of the ordinary road users that they just couldn’t understand why some persons are now pointing at their deficiency in human sensibility over the death of Prof. Iyayi. How can they get it when all they care about is how to service their large-sized but vacuous egos?Shame.

     In case they don’t know, the man they murdered had fought many battles on their behalf. He had made painful and personal sacrifices. He had faced military brutality with the might of his pen. He had put his life on the line in the search of a better society. The agonies, the pains and anguish were not made so that one of the drivers of a power-drunk state executive could extinguish his bubbly life. No. They were made for the entrenchment of a just, equitable and egalitarian society. It was in pursuance of that dream that he left Benin for Kano, to participate in a discourse that would shape the future of the nation’s education sector. Ironically, he was killed in a state where primary school education had been in the limbo for long while teachers had not been paid their meagrely salaries for four straight months due to government ineptitude. What cruel fate?

     Yet we gain nothing dwelling on the negatives. Though a tragic loss, the literary community should celebrate a man that stood tall in fighting for a cause he lived and died for. In unveiling his personae, Richard Akinnola writes of the deprivations he suffered under the Babangida regime; the persecutions he faced under Prof. Grace Alele-Williams, the then VC of UNIBEN because of his principled struggle for an egalitarian society, particularly for students in the university and the harrowing experiences he went through in the hands of his tormentors as contained in the prison notes published by Akinnola in the rested National Concord of February 1996.

     In a moving tribute to the humanist, OlawaleDibia-Ajayi speaks of the dilemma of having to write about Iyayi in the past. He captures their last meeting thus: “The Iyayi I “knew” was never drunk on anything. He had knowledge; he had opportunities; he had the connections where they mattered; but none of these worldly things intoxicated him. He pointed at errors with love and corrected with the meekness of a good mentor that is so rare among his peers. In my last encounter with him, he told me of his worries and fears: He was worried about the rising emergence of opportunists within the ranks and file of labour unions in the country; he feared for the next generations of ASUU activists; he felt sorry for the decadence in students unionism in the country; and decried the insincerity in the war against corruption by the present administration in Nigeria. How do I bring myself to writing about Professor Iyayi in the past tense! Life is wicked.”

     Indeed, nothing could be more wicked than man’s inhumanity to man. It was in the course of fighting this injustice through ensuring a better future for our children that Iyayi had to pay the ultimate price. Here was a man who, in a prison memo, wrote about how he was dehumanised when he was detained by the military for fighting for the cause of ASUU some 20 or more years back. It is a shame that about 26 years after leading ASUU against the hydra-headed demons plaguing our governance, especially in the education sector, he would still be at the forefront of the battle for improved education in 2013. See how fast we are developing backwards?

     Listen to the sordid part of his tale in detention: “I was slapped repeatedly. I tried to protect my face and then I was slapped even more for doing so. In a few minutes, my eyes were swollen. “Remove your pants”, one of my attackers with the neck of a bull ordered. I hesitated, for which i received two slaps at once. My eyes sting me, my ears sting me. I see stars flying around me.  My eyes were smarting under the pain now and the water came out and ran down my cheeks. I was not crying but yet, I couldn’t hold back the water.”

     Yes, Iyayi went through this and more. He came out of it all, convinced that Nigeria would get there some day. He lived that dream. He died for that dream. The least he would have expected was for those who murdered him to treat his death with some respect and dignity. No one could have thought that some deranged souls would cheapen his death with naked lies and half truths about how a convoy on 80 kilometres per hour could cause such fatality in which the aggressor now claims innocence and audaciously hangs the guilt on the victim! It is a shame that a governor who places so much value on his own life to the point of wearing bullet-proof vest on a babanriga, merely to condole victims in a hospital, would be the one wasting lives with reckless abandon and executive impunity! It is sad. Very sad. And so, for Iyayi, we are not crying even if the water won’t just stop dropping from our cheeks. Or is it that we are unconsciously crying for a man who said in one of his books titled “Violence” that “those who carry the cross for the society always get crucified in the end?”

  • Bala’s bulldozers and crude injustice

    Within the last two weeks, Kubwa, a highly-populated suburb in the Federal Capital Territory, has come under vicious transformation. Its serenity has been raped, its essence laid bare and its economy ripped. As usual, the agents of tears, anguish and sorrow justify their act on the need to blindly enforce the “Abuja Master plan”. In the hands of an uncaring government and an utterly unfeeling bureaucracy, the term has been imbued with evil propensities, draining the little life out of many souls that daily struggle to make sense out of the challenge of survival in Abuja. When they talk of this master plan, you get the impression that its provisions are sacrosanct like a divine law cast in stone. But that is where the tragedy lies because; over the years, the Abuja master plan has become a tool of suppression, oppression and alienation in the hands of successive ministers of the Federal Capital Territory. Like the law, the Abuja master plan is propped up as an ass that respects no one. And so, violators of building plans and approvals, no matter how highly-placed, must go through the agony of having such buildings pulled down no matter the cost, right? Not really. The law may be an ass but it sure knows its bounds.

    Ironically, Nigeria’s Presidential Villa, sits on a land clearly earmarked for a different purpose in the master plan. I remember vividly too, that the authorities excused the exculpation of Aso Rock with an argument that the illegality did not cause any major damage to the master plan. A solution was ingeniously manufactured by simply looking the other way! Or who could have dared to order former President Olusegun Obasanjo to vacate Aso Villa, the seat of power? Definitely not el-Rufai! It was the same excuse that was offered for the reluctance of the MallamNasir el-Rufai administration to demolish the popular Eagle Square, which was built on a land reserved for train stations in the master plan. Until their owners crossed paths with those in power, several other buildings were overlooked by the authorities even when they vagrantly breach the much-vaunted master plan. It was quite understandable then that the rich and influential hardly get caught in such mess in which the poor and vulnerable were always found culpable. So much for justice.

    Many residents had consigned such arrogant display of impunity and sheer wickedness to the dust bin of history until the latest onslaught on hapless citizens by the current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Senator Bala Mohammed. For a minister who popped into prominence with his incomprehensible predilection forhunting and hurling commercial sex workers into detention camps and a peculiar fixation with land issues, it came as a surprise to many that he could deploy same vigour to depriving law-abiding citizens of their means of survival, even with unmistakable savagery. For a man who is still under serious scrutiny by the National Assembly for the role his men played in the demolition of estates with hundreds of housing units worth billions of Naira, it beggars belief that Bala remains unrepentant in his haste to impress his masters that he has the capacity to descend on luckless citizens with such fiendish candour. Unfortunately, President Goodluck Jonathan may not understand the depth of the psychological trauma that Bala’s morbid deployment of bulldozers continues to inflict on hard-working residents of Nigeria’s political capital city until he spares time to tour affected areas. Simply put, it is despicable and unconscionable.

    And let no one come up with that bunkum argument that the minister cannot look the other way and allow people to violate the government’s dream for a modern city. We do know that government is the worst culprit when talking about the cruel rape of the master plan. Besides, didn’t they say that what’s sauce for the geese should also be sauce for the gander? There must be something fundamentally wrong with a government that habitually implements its own law in the breach. For example, there is nothing in the master plan that says all ministries, departments and agencies must struggle for space in the Central Business District. In case Bala is too busy to read, a critical sector like Ministry of Education which crammed its staff in an office at the Federal Secretariat should have been operating from Bwari where the JAMB office and the Law School are located. The same principles apply to all the MDAs muscling the master plan in brazen violation of its sanctimonious inviolability. But has Bala ever thought of upturning the apple cart by insisting on doing the needful by correcting the glaring anomalies? Never!

    Don’t get it twisted. We do understand that, in these days of the long knives, key ‘loyalists’ would sacrifice just about anything to remain in the good books of Mr. President. Juicy positions like that of the FCT Minister are not that easy to appropriate. So, we do understand the surreptitious move to ‘bring down’ the property of perceived enemies of Jonathan, especially those who have publicly proclaimed their love for the new Peoples Democratic Party. That, more than any other thing, was the reason behind the threat to demolish the building housing the nPDP and the sealing of the Adamawa Government House some weeks back. Suddenly, the officers at the Development Control woke up from a prolonged slumber to realise some houses had been built on sewage lines, water ways or green areas. So much for common sense! Just that one had expected that some persons should have outgrown cheap politicking by now.

    No matter how one looks at it, the ongoing demolition of business outfits, shops and mini-malls in Kubwa cannot be justified. Unless there is a deliberate plan to impoverish those struggling to make a decent living out of the harvest of official sleaze going on in high places and unlessMr.Bala is bent on pursuing the agenda that Abuja has no space for the poor, then Jonathan should step in and call his minister to order. Already, his demolition squad has inflicted unimaginable pain and anguish on hundreds of victims living in the area. Quite a number of them are depressed and may soon turn into emotional wrecks. Businesses have been ruined, families torn apart and investments worth millions of naira lost to the deadly strikes of Bala’s bully bulldozers backed by the wicked grin on the faces the gun-toting policemen superintending the operation. It’s amazing that, amidst the ruins, these mindless souls could still find ample time to taunt helpless victims with the ferocious capacity of their AK-47s. They have crossed the bounds of human feelings and couldn’t have given a hoot to the ceaseless wailings around them. For them, it would be a great honour to silence the anguished cries with a bullet in the heart!

    As should be expected, the victims of the bulldozing rage do not belong to the rank of the privileged few who can source N255 million to procure the best armoured vehicles money can buy and signed it off as “doing the needful”. They are less concerned about the ministerial frenzy in rushing to construct a N2 billion banquet hall in Aso Rock, to take care of the special friends of the President. They have since stopped worrying their heads about how a humongous sum of N500 billion could disappear from the Sure-P funds. It is not their business either if the FCT decides to seek additional billions to erect a befitting structure for the comfort of the Vice President. They never asked question when Balaallegedly donated more than 70 vehicles to the Goodluck/Sambo campaign organisation. Of course, they knew it was an investment that is bound to yield a thousand fold if things went well like it did. They were not outraged by media reports that the minister donated N300 million only for the construction of a mosque in his village. To them, nothing is too big to give to God. They are, in the main, concerned about how they can survive with their meagre earnings without tarnishing their only priceless possession on earth—good name. It is, therefore, shocking that these persons are now the targets of Bala’s rage. And we ask the question: where do the broken hearts go?

    To underscore the tragedy, a colleague, IkennaEmewu of “The SUN”, writes in article titled ‘Tears in Kubwa’ and published on Wednesday: “Kubwa, the centre of attraction in the Federal Capital Territory has harvested tears from the Bwari Area Council in the past two weeks. The largest outpost of the Abuja municipal city is reeling in pains, as the claws and teeth of bulldozers tore down hundreds of shop, leaving shop owners and landlords in tears and pains. The first places visited felt it would be just a passing nightmare until the claws dug in and yanked off numerous shops and business places.”

    In another article published in the Abuja Review pages of The NATION last Tuesday, AdenikeAdebowale painted the gloomy picture of the destruction that was hatched right before the eyes of these common Nigerian eking a living in the most demeaning conditions. As the purveyors of doom went on with their unusual business, she says: “Bulldozers roared and structures came crashing down, rattling other structures. The wrath of the Federal Capital Territory Administration came down on the residents as if it was Judgment Day.The demolition team came with hardened hearts, blocked ears and grave looks. They pitied no one. The structures, they said, were illegal.Landlords and residents desperate to save their structures got no attention from officials who turned deaf ears to their pleas.Houses, shops, churches and mosques were not spared in the act which most people described as cruel.”

    Each time structures like the ones in Kubwa came tumbling down to the knockout punches of bulldozers, the standard excuse has always been the same—abuse of a master plan that is violently raped daily by the same authorities saddled with the responsibility of preserving it. These are persons who have lost touch with how other countries have been providing affordable accommodation for their citizens. There are characters who have woefully failed to make any positive impact other than setting traps for sex workers and complicating the land issue with a land swap project. These are the same strategists whose policy has ended up compounding the woes of thousands of commuters and rendered many helplessly hopeless. Could that be the spirit behind the drafting of the master plan? Did the drafters of this template for developing a new city ever imagined a period when the rich and influential would deploy it as a tool of suppression, alienation and intimidation? And is that all that makes a minister tick? Shouldn’t there be more to being a Minister of the FCT than a crazy commitment to sending thousands of residents out of jobs and condemning them to years of psychological traumas? Let Bala think about these things as we await those who should call him to order to do the needful on the matter! He should stop dancing ‘skelewu’ on the graves of the living dead!

  • There we go again…

    Nigeria remains the victim of the triple monsters it continues to cuddle at its own peril. If we must be frank,

    it shouldn’t be that difficult for anyone who is conversant with the way we do things here to identify the three evils behind our national malaise. These three things – politics, religion and ethnicity – play major roles in shaping our thinking and approach to issues since the 1914 forced marriage of strange bedfellows. I know some people have gone too far with their vain, self- righteousness to admit this flaw in most of us.However, it does not preclude the crying truth. Together, we make a song and dance of the patriotic fervour that binds us as nationals of one Nigeria. But we do know that these peripheral gestures are cloaked in a warped, burning regional ethos which truly defines us. In our outward show of solidarity, Nigeria remains the currency of negotiation. But, deep in our hearts, it is nothing but a mere geographical expression of a people living in deceit.

    We do not need to recount the deadly oddities we conjure in the name of religion. Clergymen feed fat and easily exploit congregations through religion. We kill, maim and destroy in the name of religion. Thousands have been hacked to death and there is so much fury in the land. The peace that is said to be central to all religions has been replaced with piercing bullets, bombs and gruesome killings. Those who use religion to move up the political ladder have continued to apply it as the opium of the people. It has been used as a weapon of segregation, suppression and mutual distrust. That is the politics of religion. We have seen how it has been used to impoverish millions of hapless Nigerians to accept outright outlandishness as the norm. We know those who use the faith to intimidate or cow others into submission. We are not unmindful of leaders who make a public show of a presumed religiosity to garner votes only to ignore the divine teachings of the faith. We know clerics who are content with serving as jesters in the corridors of power and in palaces of the well-heeled, at the peril of the pulpit. We couldn’t have forgotten the ones who fan the embers of hatred, deepen poverty and deliberately nurture an armoury of human bombs.

    When it comes to worship in religious places, I doubt if any nation can ever beat us in the race of public show of peripheral piety and penitence. We are just too good at acting up the script. Yet, deep down, we lack the greatest gift of all – love. Maybe we are too self-conceited to understand why things continue to crumble around us. Question is: when we look at the mirror, what do we see? Like I have always observed on this page, ours is a society that thrives on a binge of self-denial. We know the monstrous damage that greed and avarice have inflicted on the soul of this nation, but we are always first to deny such. We know those who feed fat on our commonwealth, but we are content with keeping mum for as long as the crumbs keep falling from their tables for our consumption.We are not unmindful of the grave danger that blind looting and grand larceny pose to our continuous existence, yet we look the other way and fervently hope for our time to partake in the frenzied rape of the treasury. We are quick to admonish those who dare raise a voice against any kinsman who partakes in this shame of a nation.

    If this reads like the disjointed rambling of a dispirited writer, then I crave your indulgence. It’s just that, in times like this when politics, religion and ethnicity are being deployed to cover up what ordinarily should be the collective shame of a nation, you can’t help the depression that sets in as you try to unravel the mystery. You can’t help but marvel at the ease with which some persons complicate otherwise simple issue. How, for example, did an investigation into the purchase of two armoured cars at an alleged inflated price of N255m for the Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority turn into such a farce in which some disoriented youth groups now threaten the Presidency? How did allegations of ethnic cleansing, politicking and pull-her-down syndrome creep into an issue that raises questions about official graft and sheer profligacy? When did we get to the level where we now shield a public official from being investigated on corruption charges on the pretext that such individual is doing ‘a good job’?

    Politics.Religion.Ethnicity. These three vices have not only been introduced into a seemingly straight forward case but they also have been craftily deployed to thwart the course of justice. First, the coordinating spokesman for all agencies under the Ministry of Aviation, YakubuDati, linked the general hysteria over the car purchase to the vicious politics being played by leaders of the All Progressives Congress. Later, it was the turn of various amorphous groups to defend the controversial car purchase, justify it and threaten to withdraw ‘support’ for President Goodluck Jonathan should he remove the minister from office. No blackmail could be cheaper than this. Then there was the utterly incomprehensible combative rally between the faction which vehemently declared its opposition to the car purchase and the one in support. In that battle of wits on the streets of Abuja, both parties as well as the police threw decorum to the winds. Not long after, the ethnic card was dangled by those who thought one of their own was being needlessly humiliated for an infraction common to all other privileged thieves in our warped system. Now, those who exhibit their religiosity publicly conveniently lie under oath at the National Assembly with astonishing sombreness. Shame simply takes a flight at the sight of the awesome power of filthy graft!

    Still, we must get to the roots of the vexatious acquisition of those moving toys and its propriety. If not for anything, a hardworking, self-made entrepreneur and one of the shining lights in the Jonathan administration like Princess Stella Oduah deserves to be given the opportunity to clear her name in this latest scandal. Let’s face it: People like that do not walk out with a whisper on the basis of an unfounded allegation of complicity in a duplicitous N643m auto loan deal. They either fall with a thunderous thud or walk out in a blaze of thunderous aplomb. No matter how loud the noisemaking, those fingered in the curious transactions should understand the imperative of proving their innocence.

    The diversionary tactic may offer temporary respite but surely, it cannot bury Nigerians’ cravings for the truth. Was there truly a case of over-invoicing in the purchase? Were the armoured cars bought as part of ‘operational facilities’ for foreign aviators or for the minister? Was there a need to buy a set of armoured cars when she was already in possession of two others bought by another parastatal? Were extant laws on procurement violated in the deal? Was an auto loan deal economically sound and was it expedient? Was it true that a private business concern got waivers from the government and lied about what the cars were meant to be used for? These and many other questions need to be answered regardless of the annoying blabbering of political persecution and ethnic bias. The time may not be ripe to hang Oduah in the sun to dry. But it is ludicrously infantile for anyone with a jot of shame to plead her innocence on the basis of politics, tribe or even religion. If they have a sense of history, they would have known that other persons had passed through this painful trajectory without playing the tri-polar bunkum.Oftentimes, they take their ill fate with philosophical equanimity knowing they were the unlucky ones among the band of the callous rapists in the system!

    Perhaps, we need to ask the question: what is it in our genes that make Nigerian elites so insensitive to the plight of the millions of people they daily impoverish through insatiable self-aggrandisement. Maybe we should turn to Lord Lugard, the Governor-General who concretised this sham marriage in 1914 with the belief that, as Africans, we hardly can turn away from our mean ways. Listen to his description of the Nigerian in a book, The Dual Mandates, published in 1926:  “In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight. Naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewellery. His thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from the apprehension for the future or grief for the past. His mind is far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals’ placidity and want of desire to rise beyond the state he has reached.

    “Through the ages, the African appears to have evolved no organised religious creed, and though some tribes appear to believe in a deity, the religious sense seldom rises above pantheistic animalism and seems more often to take the form of a vague dread of the supernatural. He lacks the power of organisation, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business. He loves the display of power, but fails to realize its responsibility – he will work hard with a less incentive than most races. He has the courage of the fighting animal, an instinct rather than a moral virtue. In brief, the virtues and defects of his race -type are those of attractive children, whose confidence when it is won is given ungrudgingly as to an older and wiser superior and without envy. Perhaps, the two traits which have impressed me as those most characteristic of the African native are his lack of apprehension and his lack of ability to visualize the future.”

    You are not wrong if you think the choice of words is benevolently harsh. But, some 100 years after, is there anything we have done or are doing differently to disprove Lord Lugard’s sweeping condemnation? Are we not still rationalising vanity and toying with our future by snuggling with the inanities that define our present and ruin our future? Is it not clear that the multi-billion Naira centennial celebrations to mark the wrong-footed Lugardian marriage is a further justification of the colonial officers’ characterization of the “natives” of Nigeria? Pity.

  • As our executive prayer ‘warriors’ visit Jerusalem

    As our executive prayer ‘warriors’ visit Jerusalem

    The psychological damage that insincere people in leadership positions use organised religions to perpetrate on the younger generation is beyond comprehension.As I write this, a select group of very important personalities is in Jerusalem, Israel joining their ‘faith’ with that of President Goodluck Jonathan to pray for Nigeria. Even the greatest enemies of this 53-year-post weaned toddler wouldn’t deny it the right to seek God’s intervention in tackling its multiple, self-inflicted crises. With churches sprouting on a daily basis in every nook and cranny; with astronomic increase in mosques at every available corner and with clerics of all faith, denominations, shades, and forms, Nigeria can’t be said to be lacking in religiosity even if a huge question hangs over whether the millions of faithful are truly religious. Ours is a contradiction in faith and fate. We are surrounded by the abundance of the Creator’s mercy but fate seems to have bequeathed to us a generation of leaders who lack faith in their ability to push us to our full potential. Oftentimes and with benumbing recklessness, we fritter away Mother Nature’s free gifts. With a docile population wreathed in ignorance and too scared to demand fairness and equity, the ruling elite has crossed the bend with the dexterity with which it deodorises poverty with an allure of futuristic hope. It is one hope that is always so near yet too far. For 53 years, the cravings for that hope have yielded nothing but despair!

    Surely, the faithful among us know that the unenviable trajectory of our nationhood couldn’t have been for the absence of prayers or supplications to the Alpha and Omega of all creations. Today, Nigeria has more clerics than medical doctors, lawyers and technocrats put together. What more, most of them are well-educated, urbane and politically-exposed. That should not be surprising anyway. Many in the professions have jumped ship, heeded the esoteric call and ‘ported’ to the other side of life where it is now a fad to move in convoys of bulletproof cars and get “blessed’ with private jets. This communion of religionists is brimming with men and women who claim to have received His call to fish for more lost souls which would make this world a better place to live; incorruptible men that cannot be bought with silver of gold. These are men who will tell the leaders the bleeding truth without genuflecting. I speak of men fated to live for the faith so that the faithful can reap from the blessings of the land. Question is: are we progressing towards that reality today? I seriously doubt.

    Unfortunately, the hyped pilgrimage by the President and the usual retinue of court jesters does not give one any hope. From the tone of the statement issued by his spokesman, Dr. Reuben Abati, it is obvious that Jonathan would spend more time doing business than he would share with other pilgrims in a solemn assembly. What this means is that he may barely have the time to reflect on why Nigeria is in dire straits. Perhaps, he may not even understand why some of us think most members on his entourage need special deliverance so that they can truly work for the good of all. They need to be exorcised of an ancestral greed that has impoverished most Nigerians. They need to be washed and cleansed before they can begin to see how they have become a major part of the problem. It is for this reason that no one takes them seriously when they preach the mantra of being a critical part of the solution. Have they been weaned of endemic greed and avarice? Have they been purged of a sickening mentality of grabbing and more grabbing?

    Interestingly, Minister NyesomWike, wearing a very pious look, stood in for Mr. President during the 4th National Prayer Breakfast meeting organised by members of the National Assembly at the International Conference Centre in Abuja on Thursday morning. He audaciously stood at the pulpit and spoke of how God has used the administration to touch and transform our lives. Ha!

    I couldn’t help giggling when I stumbled on Abati’s statement that it was ‘fortuitous’ that Nigerian pilgrims to Jerusalem this year would be doing so with Jonathan. From the clustered itinerary, Jonathan may jolly well be on a working visit to Israel rather than on pilgrimage. In any case, we are aware that not all JPs are worthy of being addressed as such. Even if we concede that chance has a role in the arrangement, how does that affect the price of Okporoko? How much of spiritual interface can Jonathan spare to commune with God on a pilgrimage where he was billed to meet with President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset; parley with Israeli government officials on the enhancement of bilateral relations in areas including trade, economic development, infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, communications, culture, education and tourism; and thereafter meet with the President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mr. Mahmoud Abbas?

    With a delegate list crammed with names of who is who in his cabinet including the National Security Adviser, Col. SamboDasuki (rtd), there should be no prize for guessing where Aso Rock has relocated. And since we have been told, when president Olusegun Obasanjo was at the helm of affairs, that our President can ‘rule’ from any part of the globe, we should appreciate Jonathan’s magnanimity for sparing the time to interact with “some other Nigerians who are already on a pilgrimage to Israel.” Aren’t they lucky? I guess it provides the rare opportunity to ask the President some burning questions. Why the widening gulf between the rich and poor? Why has corruption become the template of governance? What is responsible for our developmental woes in 53 years of independence? And, like ObyEzekwesili recently asked, is bad governance by the political elite the most reasonable explanation for why the massive revenue from oil has resulted in massive sorrow, estrangement and alienation of the citizens? Is this country truly the best example of the African paradox of an old man in diapers?

    Perhaps, Jonathan, his entourage and the state governors on the tour would learn one or two lessons from the resilience of the Israeli government over the years. Unlike here where corruption has blighted the vision for a great nation, Israel has continued to rub shoulders with the world’s best in all spheres because of the patriotism and dedication of its leadership. For a country that is always in perpetual war with its neighbours, that is not a feat that should be brushed aside. It is a place where leaders wear their thinking caps on their heads and not tucked in the pockets!

    And so, if and when they find the time to pray for this country, may they have the courage to ask God to deal mercilessly with the evil men who continue to kill the dream of this nation no matter how highly-placed or influential they may be. May they be bold enough to crave the wrath of His judgment on the heads of those who blindly loot our commonwealth and expose the vast majority of the people to the vagaries of poverty.As they kneel to pray, may they see visions to guide them through how they can immediately resolve the crisis in the education sector, the paralysis affecting our health institutions, the epilepsy that has gripped power reform, the dwindling economy and cluelessness in governance. And above all, may they understand that, as mortals, serious leaders do not need to live in bunkers, move around in armoured cars or private jets to etch their names in the hearts of the people. Al they need is to be true to their conscience, work assiduously for all and implant their footprints in the sands of time!

    Like Governor GodswillAkpabio noted shortly before joining the President’s delegation to Jerusalem, this junket should afford our leaders the opportunity to pray for the progress of the nation. But how can the nation progress in a situation where the direct beneficiaries of Akpabio’s hyped “uncommon transformation in partnership with an uncommon God” are less than ten per cent of over 170 million Nigerians? Or do they serve a God that is different from the one and only God who insists on fairness, equity and love among brethren? Again, William Hazlitt has something to say on hypocrisy: “The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”Are they prepared to listen to the admonitions of the sage?

  • Governance: What is the MIF up to?

    If it is meant to be a joke, then someone should tell the yamheads at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation that it’s one joke carried too far. How can they rub our face on granite and expect us to smile? Even a blind man here knows that there is a ‘transformation agenda’ on stream. It is moving at a frenetic pace and the fever is catching fast. Its impact can be felt in all areas of our economy, sports, politics, and social life and even, in all our homes. When President Goodluck Jonathan assumed power some years back, he took time to outline his vision and even though Nigerians have less than vague perceptions of it, those who are close to him would tell you that he has never wavered on any of those visions. A democrat par excellence, Jonathan, unlike others before him, has allowed the opposition to thrive. He is not one to hound critics out of town, send security forces after them, revoke their plots of land or silence them with subtle threat. You can hardly come across a gentleman with nobler intentions than the Otuoke-born leader of Africa’s largest gathering of the black race.

    In case members of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s Independence Prize Committee don’t know, they do the continent no good in the yearly ritual of foraging for former African leaders worthy of its $5 million Prize for Excellence in Leadership. What is a mere $5 million to the leader of a country where crude oil worth billions of dollars routinely disappear every week? What is the point when there is an abundance of living legends in government houses scattered across the continent? Okay, maybe it would be difficult to push an argument that the legendary wizard of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, who recently won a moon slide election that may see him die in office, should be given the prize. Of course, he may not have been a success story in terms of changing the fortunes of his people. But no one can deny his first class grade in excelling in all elections he participated in. What riles Knucklehead is the MIF’s statement on the Nigerian nation. It is shocking, to say the least, that in spite of the unprecedented transformation and silent revolution going on in Nigeria, all that the MIF could come up with was a warped rating which places us in 41st position out of the 52 countries it claimed to have rated. If we may ask, what were the parameters used in this assessment? Who sponsored it? Which of the political parties did the members belong to? Was there any ulterior motive to play politics since 2015 is fast approaching? How were the members selected? What marking scheme, if any, did they use? And how truly ‘independent’ were the members of the MIF committee? As usual, Nigerian government must have seen the hands of the opposition in this rating.

    If these guys were not specially selected to denigrate the highly respected and infallible office of the Nigerian President, they would have taken time to visit Nigeria in order to have a fair assessment of what is on the ground. Such visit would have afforded them the opportunity to meet one-on-one with our amiable President and experience our rare hospitality. We are a grateful nation and we do not mind doling out huge gifts that will enable assessors see our truly good side.I have no doubt that the story would have been different if they had allowed our Minister of Information to take them on a two-day good governance tour of this construction jungle. In a country where the citizenry’s adrenaline daily gets pumped with excitement about the uncommon leadership acumen of President Jonathan and his team, it is befuddling that the MIF would rather see an infinitesimal increase of 0.8 per cent in governance impact since year 2000 as the only cheering news in that damning report. And as if that was not bad enough, we were ranked 13th out of 16 in the West African region with a score of 43.4 per cent which is even lower than the regional average of 52.5 per cent!

    The MIF buried its teeth deeper into the bones by insisting that its 2013 Ibrahim Index for African Governance (IIAG) indicated that Nigeria performed woefully in three out of the four categories of governance which included safety and rule of law, participation and human rights, sustainable economic opportunity and human development. Thankfully and in spite of the burgeoning youth unemployment, the country was ranked 33 out of the 52 countries rated. It was 42nd in safety and rule of law and 49th in personal safety. Be that as it may, I assume the implication of our rating in the personal safety sub-category is not lost on us. Does it mean that we are still sitting on a tinderbox sans the ‘achievements’ that have been recorded by this administration in the fight against terror? Is that all that we could get from the billions of dollars invested on security in the last three years?

    Curiously, those who should speak against this callous, damaging and politically-motivated MIF’s rating appear to have grown cold feet since it was released. Truth is, we have fistfuls of bad news already. So, an additional one can be met with unreserved indifference. Or, could it be that these characters are simply tired of reeling out the President’s achievements to a deaf audience? Or, maybe they have chosen to ignore the snarl of the enemies of the state from outside? Whatever it is, I believe that they need to counter this foul smell oozing out of the chambers of the MIF with the sweet-scented fragrance of those uncommon achievements being baked in President Jonathan’s kitchen. By now, they should be tired of throwing umbrage and launching a rash of abusive languages on local politicians at every drop of a critique of Jonathan’s presumed cluelessness in power. Sometimes, they need to export their atrocious arrogance and atavistic brashness to the backyards of interloping busy-bodies like the MIF and its ilk.

    The other day, those poor folks at the Transparency International attempted to cry more than the bereaved by claiming a total failure in the fight against corruption. But we shouted them down that we were on top of the situation. Today, the MIF, frustrated that no African leader (dead, living or even serving) is working towards winning its miserly prize of $5 million, has turned its focus on Nigeria. Does the MIF think anyone gives a hoot about that ‘princely’ prize when it is what most domestic aides in some government houses package as birthday gift to their paramours? It rates us low on safety, rule of law, economic development, participation and human rights. It says that Liberia (a country that we saved from the ravages of war and poverty) and Angola have improved rapidly since 2000. Do they expect us to swallow this bitter, demeaning pill and pretend that all is well?

    Don’t get it wrong. I have lived in this country long enough to understand that things are not that rosy. I know that, as I write this, government tertiary institutions have been under lock and key for 110 days due to lecturers’ strike. I know that the uncommon and gargantuan corruption in Nigeria has been wrestled into submission by largely indifferent government officials who claimed to have entered the ring with it. I know that the standards of medical facilities have improved tremendously, now that we spend a meagre N250bn on medical tourism annually. I know medical doctors are on strike, seeking improved pay package. I am also conversant with the billions of dollars that have been spent on the provision of megawatts of darkness across the nation. How could I have forgotten how the more than 70 per cent of our poor citizens forage for faith in the most agonising circumstances? I have heard countless stories of deferred dreams and broken promises in the face of uncommon existential challenges. I read about the millions who are out of school and the millions who have certificates but couldn’t get jobs anywhere. Everywhere you turn, there is always that large image of the stupendously rich trampling on the poor. All this has become the routine of daily living in Nigeria.

    But, it is not all bad news. If it were that bad, then saintly people like Dr.DoyinOkupe would not be sticking out their necks for Jonathan or any other ‘leader’ for that matter. This is why their silence on this MIF’s killer punch is deleterious to the wellbeing of all of us. Okupe and all those who hold the many files of the President’s countless achievements would be doing him a world of good by barking back at the MIF people now! The attack should be swift and rash! They need to show them that this latest report may jeopardise the works of a man who, in less than three years in government, has done more than what the past winners did in their respective countries. They include the likes of President JoaquimChissano of Mozambique (2007), President Festus Mogae of Botswana (2008), President Pedro Pires of Cape Verde (2011) and President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. These men were, no doubt, icons of good governance. We do not begrudge them. But we insist that what we have in Nigeria is an extraordinary leader that deserves praises from the MIF not such knocks and questionable governance index that pushes him down under!

    Thankfully, Okupe has the facts at his fingertips. It is his responsibility to make those facts available to the MIF’s committee in order to stave off this national embarrassment. Were they aware that this government has spent over N453.8 billion from the Subsidy Reinvestment Programme (SURE-P) on the complete turnaround of roads? Did they have the figures of our humongous spending on education, health, housing, welfare and youth empowerment, amnesty programme for Niger Delta youth, power, energy and infrastructures? Have they been told about how all parts of the country now enjoy a minimum of 20-hour electricity supply daily? Were they kept abreast of the valiant fight against corruption and the engagement of incorruptible aides, ministers and hangers-on by the President? Lest I forget, we should also remind these Mo Ibrahim Foundation jokers that all the ministers in charge of various sectors of our economy have acquitted themselves creditably well in the eyes of the common citizen that they now spend millions of naira buying bullet proof vehicles, flying in private jets or living in heavily-fortified mansions! By the time we bombard the MIF’s office with these and many other monumental achievements too numerous to mention here, those guys would indeed feel the impact of a choking breath of fresh air that has turned otherwise right-thinking persons into high-decibel praise-singers! Will the president’s accredited official megaphones take up the challenge now?

  • Between the princess and bleeders of the nation

    Between the princess and bleeders of the nation

    Those who had expected Nigeria’s Aviation Minister, Princess Stella Oduah, to maintain a dignified silence in the face of the combustible attacks against her person after last week’s deadly plane crash in Lagos obviously didn’t know how things work here. In saner climes, and regardless of the media hype either justifying her performance or condemning her ineptitude, this beautiful Stella would have tendered her resignation letter not so much for what she has done but for what she has refused to do. We have read stories outside our shores where public servantstendered letters of resignation without waiting to be found culpable in national tragedies of monumental proportions under their watch. Sometimes, it could be a minor indiscretion like spending some office coins to pay for a cup of tea! For crying out loud, there is no way she can exonerate her office from the decay in that sector. Okay, we agree that she is doing her utmost best to fix the inherited rot. Question is: how long must we wait before we stop blaming every jot of tragic indiscretion on the will of God? We might as well do away with all those amorphous regulatory agencies in our aviation sector, including the ministry itself since we now know that, in hugging the skies, every successful landing is dependent on the grace of God. What then is the point in wasting billions of naira buying equipment and servicing personnel that could as well sleep on their hands at the airports while planes keep falling from the skies?

    As a specialised sector, the Nigerian aviation industry would need more than the cosmetic posturing some persons are employing to dab the painted sepulchre. Frequent fliers would readily admit that they do so with trepidation in our airspace. We still lag behind in technical and operational matters even if the minister has performed wonderfully well in rehabilitating some of the buildings in our airports. But with the scandalous and unbelievable stories filtering out from the closets of the airport operators, those parading themselves as regulators of this critical sector ought to cover their faces in shame. No matter how hard they try to twist the tale, they are ultimately culpable in the over 190 deaths that have been recorded through air mishaps in the last two years. Oduah may be right that these things do happen even in countries with the best safety procedures, what she cannot defend is the frequency with which avoidable air accidents occur under her watch. That is why we had expected her to accept responsibility for the latest Associated Airlines crash in Lagos and be more reflective in addressing the issues.

    In quipping that she remains the overall boss of all the other bosses in that sector, Madam ought to know that the buck stops at her table. If she comfortably giggles when being dashed the plaudits for ‘repositioning and transforming’ air travel in Nigeria, why shouldn’t she be at home with taking the knocks for the frequent, needless, avoidable and fatal air crashes? If safety is everything, then it must be all-encompassing. We simply can’t be satisfied with the present shiny structures in most airports while the hangars are laden with flying coffins! It is, to say the least, uncharitable and pedestrian, for anyone to wave the losses as an inevitable act of God. If we accept such illogic, then we may as well accept the savagery of the Boko Haram insurgents as the will of the Creator, clasp our arms and wait for our own violent end.

    Unfortunately, those we should rely on to stop the sickening madness are not in any way better. As usual, they have been quick to anger and have equally threatened fire and brimstone in unraveling the rot that has made death so cheap in the air. But when the chips are down, can we count on them to carry through the threats? Here, I speak of the raving crowd in the National Assembly who, on Tuesday in Abuja, expressed utter frustration at the rate at which planes now crash in Nigeria. But if precedents are anything to go by, we would be deluding ourselves to expect something concrete from the latest summons of Princess Stella Oduah, the heads of the agencies under the ministry and airline operators by the lawmakers. The truth is that these folks have practically done nothing other than contributing their quota to the problem. They rake up as much muck as they can but hardly evolve time-tested solution aimed at avoiding a recurrence.

    Perhaps, if concrete steps had been taken after the June 3rd, 2013 Dana Air crash, we would not be talking about another fresh probe of that sector, including the audit of airlines. We have found ourselves in this mess because we hardly learn from the mistakes of the past. How are we sure that Dana Air’s operations would have been suspended by the aviation authorities but for the unfortunate incident involving one of the aircraft of Associated Airlines? What is the nature of the ‘operational lapses’ that warranted the suspension and how many other airlines patch things up just that they can fly? If it was found out that the crashed aircraft bearing the remains of ex-governor Olusegun Agagu was over 23 years old, then someone should be queried for flagrant display of incompetence for allowing the airline to flout a law, banning such old planes from flying the Nigerian airspace. Or was that not part of the recommendations made at the joint sittings of the National Assembly which probed the Dana Air crash? How many airlines still fly these antiques in our airspace and are the planes really airworthy?

    Of course, Oduah is at liberty to burst into riotous rage if she truly feels that her personality has been smeared on this matter. That’s why we can pardon her for the Freudian slip in which she referred to one of her critics as speaking ‘under the influence of whatever” or ‘ignorant’ or that the particular individual should “hide his head in shame” for what she considered a rabid attack. It must, however, be pointed out that the issue at hand is too serious to accommodate a shambolic response of the inevitability of crashes. I am sure Oduah is aware that the senators who raised questions on the ways she has been running the aviation sector could not, by any stretch of imagination, be drunk neither would they be talking under the influence of ‘whatever?’ These lawmakers raised fundamental questions about the state of the industry under her watch. Could it be true that the crashed Associated Airline plane was under repairs after being grounded for a month and should ordinarily have embarked on a test flight as highlighted by Senator Smart Adeyemi? Is there a dearth of professionals in the industry as noted by Senator Barnabas Gemade? Could it be true that, in spite of the noise the minister has been making about upgrading infrastructure, this nation has the unedifying aplomb of having the worst airport runway in the world as credited to Senator Oluremi Tinubu? And can we ignore the observations made by many of the senators that the industry requires a holistic overhaul as it is already in a state of emergency? These and many other questions beg for answers.

    To underscore the scary scenario trending on the social media, a friend of Facebook, Kester Busugbe, posted an interesting piece on his wall, noting: “The way things are going in Nigeria, soon before air travelers board a plane, they will personally inspect the plane, check the airworthiness, check with the agency that issued it, check the pilot’s competence, make sure that the oil in the engine gauge, check the tire pressure, check if there is enough jet fuel, see the insurance certificate of the aircraft, check the approval given to the airline to operate in Nigeria, check the age of the aircraft, check what part of the world it went for service and ask the manufacturing company if it still remembers the aircraft. After over 100 passengers must have done this, then the plane will be set to fly. So, please come four hours before scheduled take off time.” Laughable as it is, no one can shrug off this reality if we continue with the shadow-chasing in the aviation sector.

    And so, in addressing the issues, the lawmakers need to do more than the usual huffing and puffing after every critical moment in the history of this country. If they cannot bite, then they should stop the hollow barking! If they must rescue us from this free fall, then they must be prepared to get to the root of the rot in the aviation sector, which has thrown many families into permanent throes of unmitigated woes. Good enough, they have been challenged by one of their own, Senator Abiye Sekibo, to be truly committed to their oversight functions by finding out the airworthiness of all the aircraft in the fleet of the airlines operating in the country. If heads must roll in that sector, let the heads roll without any compromise. The time to put an end to the harvest of deaths in the air couldn’t have come at a better time than a period when the engine room of democratic governance, the legislature, is battling to wean itself of the tag of bleeders of the nation’s treasury.

    In case they don’t know, rumour abound in town about how corruption played a major role in the failure to implement the recommendations of reports on past air crashes including the recent Dana crash. Some persons have been said to have sold their conscience for the lure of lucre. Unfortunately, they are doing so at the peril of the larger populace and even themselves. Would they do things differently this time in order to inject some sanity into an industry that is completely rotten? We can only agonise over this question as we set out on yet another journey into finding how and when we got into this mortal mess!

  • Back to the middle of nowhere

    How do you begin to tell the story of a nation that turns and twists on the same spot as poisoned darts hit it from different directions?How do you unveil our endless tales of woe without shedding a tear?How much longer can we afford to waddle in self-pity, dancing in the dark and clutching tight to a thread of deceit? Why do we delight inprancing about in a maze that takes us exactly to the beginning ofthis painful trajectory? Why do we shut our eyes to history and what we stand to gain from it only to embrace the momentary glimmer of adeferred hope? Why fondle deceit when common-sense dictates that wetake a second look at ourselves in the mirror, to unveil the crying truth. Why do we mouth oneness when synchronised mutual distrust isthe norm? Why are we this vain?

    We are vain because we chose to live in denial. We etch plastic laughter on our faces as the country roils from one crisis into another.We proclaim a vacuous unity in a season of blood and rage. We knowthere is something seriously wrong with the contraption borne out of the 1914 colonial amalgamation but we are too scared to address it,even a year into a needless centennial celebration. We are puttingfinishing touches to a multi-billion naira anniversary of the Nigerian nation as the celebrant lies prostrate on a sick bed. This ageing nation in diapers is afflicted with different life-threateningailments. Yet, we are planning for a party as if the crises would simply vanish if we ignore them. Our roads are littered with the bloodof the innocent, mauled down by agents of darkness and we carry on asif all is well. Even, in the air, people are no longer that safe. Wetend to be comfortable with the inglorious peace of the graveyard that pervades some of our cities. But should we?

    This, I hasten to say, is not a dirge for a failed nation. It is just a wake-up call for a sleeping giant. There is disenchantment in the land and it issickening that no one appears to be doing anything about it. All thatwe hold dear is our clannish affiliations. Any other thing outside this is cheap politicking. When it comes to politics, nothing isspared. Not even the senseless killings, kidnappings and sheer criminality. Collectively, we have lost our humanity and we have given a different meaning to being our brother’s keeper. Many have losttheir voices to the violence around them and Nigeria has become themajor victim. It needs to be healed. Unfortunately, those who should be in the front of the healing process have been held captive byinterest rather than being national in outlook. In the past, allefforts made to address these multifarious problems of nationhood were either half-baked or self-serving. That is why the nation is stillsoaked in nappies about a hundred years after amalgamation andfifty-three years after independence. It is, indeed, a sorry state – a truly sorry story.

    Of course, it is not as if we have not made progress. We have, over the years, gone through different phases. But unlike many othernations that suffered the same fate with us, ours can be likened to a progression in error. We take one step forward, many steps backward. We hardly face the mirror to remove the speck in our eyes but we arequick to point at the log in others’ eyes. That is the contradictionthat has shaped our trajectory. We are the architect of this fatal fate where grandeur of delusion reigns supreme.

    If we must confront the truth, then we must admit that this nationmust tackle its fears. Clearly, the greatest fear is that ofdisintegration. With ethnic warlords beating the war drums from all corners as the country inches towards another general election in 2015, there is the need to address the question of the sustainabilityof the 1914 marriage. Today, we are torn apart by what we hate to discuss at the national level. What role should religion play in this union? Who should manage the various natural resources in differentregions? What manner of federalism should be operated? Should thecentre be stronger than the states or regions? How do you ensure fairness and equity such that the present wide gulf between the richand the eternally poor can be bridged? How do you enforce law andorder? How do you engender trust and a belief in nationhood instead of ethnic-based loyalty? How do you rein in impunity in a community ofpolitical brigands where corrosive corruption has inflicted thegravest damage to the economy? These and several other questions necessitate the call by many for the convocation of a sovereign national conference at different levels of the journey into nationhoodin the last 53 years.

    Today, as I write this, no one is sure if President GoodluckJonathan’s hurriedly packaged 53rd Independence Anniversary gift – anational dialogue committee – can be the one-in-all solution to a crises-ridden nation. Beyond the argument that its timing is suspect, especially when the idea is being muted by a President with eyes fixedon the 2015 elections, there is the fear that the latest dialoguecommittee would go the way of others since it has no sovereign power to impose the outcome of the deliberations on the nation. Some said itwas for this reason that the National Assembly hastily endorsed thecomposition of a 13-member planning panel barely 24 hours after Jonathan’s announcement. The issue, they argue, is deeper than something to be doused with a time-wasting decoy which will eventuallylead the country to where it has always been – groping in the dark!

    True, Jonathan may not have the right answers to the problems. He may not have convinced us about having the capacity to confront the clearand present danger staring us in the face. But he is right, regardlessof how half-hearted it may appear to some person, in calling for a dialogue to discussthe way forward. He is also not making any pretence about how bad things have become under his watch. Listen tohim: “I admit that these may not be the best of times for our nation.

    Our people are divided in many ways – ethnically, religiously, politically and materially. I cannot hide from this reality.” Simply put: there is no hiding place for this Otuoke-born leader!

    The reality is that Nigeria is hurting, bleeding on all fronts. The future of millions of fortunate youths who are lucky to be getting tertiary education has been put under lock and key with over three months lecturers’ strike. Some would argue that the key has been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean with Jonathan’s arm-in-the-air verdict that he had done all that was humanly possible to talk sense into the heads of the stubborn teachers! Medical doctors have since joined the madness across the nation. Kidnappings and deadly crimes persist. Life iscrude and brutish as gunmen now kill in hundreds and walk into thin air. Corruption is on a free ride as industrial-scale stealing of the nation’s crude oil daily inflicts a deeper injury on the economy.Jonathan’s ambition to run for a second term in office has a potential of heating the polity. The crisis within the ruling Peoples Democratic Party portends nothing but bad omen in the coming months. Ethnic bigots are at theirshameful best, promising to unleash terror depending on which part ofthe country the pendulum of power swings in 2015. Time is, indeed, running out on a nation that has it all but just couldn’t manageanything without ruining it with self-serving, myopic politics.

    The problem here is not in the call for talks. In 53 years of our independence, we have had cause to hold talks countless times. Thelast confab, which was organised in 2005 by former President OlusegunObasanjo amid suspicion that he was plotting for a third term in office, gulped more than one billion Naira with no appreciable resultsas the report is wasting away somewhere in Aso Rock. The greatestchallenge before Jonathan’s National Dialogue Committee will not come from the ability to convene the talk or bringing together aggrievedNigerians to express their views about the form, nature and basis ofour continued existence as one indivisible nation. No, that has never been a challenge at any point in time. However, we wait, with bated breath, to see how this latest money-spinning dialogue team willconvince the chief convener, Jonathan, to implement its recommendations in an environment where the National Assembly has expressed satisfaction with the fact that the dialogue is notsovereign! That is the real problem. If this latest effort will end up gathering dust like many others before it, then we may as well take solace in the fact that we are progressing in error and rushing backto the middle of nowhere as the nation burns! God bless Nigeria.

  • And Mr. President rang the 2015 bell

    And Mr. President rang the 2015 bell

    It has been an open secret for so long. And unless we want to elevate pretence to an art with teeth deeply buriedin the tongue,

    we must agree that there is nothing new in the declaration in New Yorkby President Goodluck Jonathan that he might be running for the Presidency in 2015. Everyone had long concludedthat he was going to run. We had always known that his aides would

    soon run out of the web of tendentious lies they had regularly spunto justify his ‘disinterest’ in talking about his future. Those conversant with the key role deceit plays in our politics had projected that apresidential declaration of intent to contest the 2015 election was just a matter of time.It is, therefore, not surprising that Mr. Jonathan merely confirmed what we had known all along. The only surprise is the illogical, not so patriotic decision to announce it on foreign soil. Indeed, how many American Presidents ever announced such electoral ambition after visiting the Nigerian Stock Exchange? Sometimes, GEJ does not even pretend or try enough to make us feel proud. He chose to announce his grand entry into the race in New York City, United States of America, where he had gone for the United Nations General Assembly. It is also quite interesting that the declaration of a willingness to throw his hat in the ring came somefew hours before Jonathan was giventhe honour to ring the closing bellat the prestigious New York Stock Exchange, (NYSE). As far as his supporters are concerned, it is not,by any shade of imagination, a mean fit for Jonathan to go down in history as Nigeria’s first leader to ring the closing bell at the NYSE.

    The uninitiated is likely to ask: what’s the fuss about ringing a stock exchange bell? A lot, I dare say. The symbolism should not belost to those who know how to read the temperature of the politicalcalculus in this clime. It doesn’t matter how insignificant that gesture is to the Americans, we do know here that it is a veritableavenue for scoring cheap political points. In a country where governors now list the successful celebration of their birthdays, construction of lavatories and building of Olympic-sized swimmingpools as “monumental achievements,” it is not impossible that the NYSE’sclosing-bell-ringing event may find its way into the President’s campaign posters. You can only perish that thought at your own peril.

    With this in mind, do you still wonder why the anti and pro-Jonathan camps have taken the battle online? While some feel there is nothing specialabout the event, his staunch supporters argue that he should becommended and congratulated for a successful outing at the NYSE. Now don’t be surprised if some political jobbers decide to take it to thenext level by churning out millions of naira for the publication ofadvertorials, congratulating the President for making Nigeria proud atthe 68th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, United States. That’s how low we have sunk. But then, I digress.

    Those waiting on Jonathan to make his intentions on 2015 known in ‘black and white’ will have to wait in perpetuity. What is important is that he has, in his usual fashion, chosen to make his stance on the matter public in the US. That’s a minor problem considering the fact that we have been told that the President can decide to rule and issue policy directives from any part of the world. Or was it not alleged that Jonathan told Nigerians in the diaspora and diplomats in Ankara, Turkey in February 2011 that he was not going to run in 2015? How about the statement he made in an African country to the effect that he would only serve single four-year tenure in office? Now that he has decided to change the rhythm in New York, why should anyone fret? We really do notneed the help of a clairvoyant to interpret his body language or thedepth of his words. Clearly, there is no point asking his official spokesman, Dr. Reuben Abati, if it was right to read meanings to hisassertion that the Constitution provides for “maximum of eight yearsfor anyone who wants to become a president or a governor.” Any right thinking Nigerian should be able to decode this without the help of a shrink!

    Besides, Jonathan’s kinsman and ex-militant, MujahidAsari-Dokubo, has toldanyone who cares to listen that a Jonathan 2015 ambition is “foregoneconclusion,” adding with his usual boisterous arrogance that those calling on the President to have a rethink,especially members of the AbubakarBaraje-led faction of the Peoples Democratic Party are”political miscreants that should be chased out of the PDP and dealtwith decisively.” Forget his huffing and puffing, even this ethnic irredentist has tempered his language to pave the way for Jonathan’s grandentry into the presidential race. The other day, the nation woke up toread the statements credited to the Niger Delta warlord, struggling, words after words, to itemise all that he had done to show love to peoplesof different geo-political zones, including how he currently placedover 100 northerners on his scholarship scheme. I knew then that the rapprochement has begun and the campaign gear has been put on auto drive. Or is it not the same Asari-Dokubo that threatened a spiral ofviolence should Jonathan be made to abandon his seat withoutcompleting eight years? Is it not the same person that has vowed to return to the creeks to unleash terror on those piping out the naturalresources of his Ijaw brother? So, what has changed that he nowsuddenly remembers his undying love for all shades of people irrespective of their political or cultural leanings?

    Nothing has really changed other than the fact that those beating the ethnic drum coming to the realisation of the futility of their rant.The complexities of the contraption called Nigeria make it absolutelyimpossible for any zone to go it alone. If that were to be possible, I bet the tempo of the abuse would have increased. We know why it hasdimmed and why it will continue to dim. Now that Jonathan has soundedthe alarm bell of his intent to contest the presidency in 2015, we expect to see a barrage of those uncommon transformations that he haswrought on this country. We would be told about his selfless heroismin fighting terror to a standstill such that Borno State is now freeof the menace.I am sure an explanation will be invented for Shekau’smagical ‘resurrection.’ All that we see now are mere remnants of a deflated terror gang. We should expect a sermon on the glittering new roadsthat now dot our landscapes from Lagos to Maiduguri; the history thatwas made with travellers making a rail transport from Kaduna to Lagos;the transformation of the aviation sector in line with international standards; the unprecedented funding of the education sector withequally high standards obtainable anywhere in the world; the provisionof the best healthcare system that makes it impossible for the high and mighty to waste billions of dollars on medical tourism; creationof employment for millions of Nigerians and a host of otherachievements too numerous to mention due to space constraint.

    In fairness to Jonathan, he has always made one simple demand: he pleads to be judged solely on performance. Yes, we do know that, in spite ofgranting amnesty to former warlords in the Niger Delta, bunkering andcrude theft persists with billions of dollars lost daily. Budget implementation may be appealingly low but we cannot completely blame him for that. Corruption may be growing in leaps and bounds but hehas, rightfully so, blamed us for encouraging the corrosively corruptamong us to steal more. He has tasked us on the need to report those living in houses they are not supposed to live, driving cars they are not supposed to drive or wearing suits that are meant for princes andprincesses. Over ten million children may be out of school but he oncereminded us that he did not create the problem. Graduate unemployment may be soaring but we’ve been told, times without number, thatmillions have been employed too. Don’t ask me where they are. All we know is that government can’t lie about these things! Insecurity, killings and criminalsactivities may be choking the populace, but why should we blame aPresident who has urged us to tarry a while and all that would be a story of the past. Our roads may not have been weaned of its ‘deathtrap’ moniker, but we all know that it takes time to correct the manyyears of neglect of these roads by past administrations. The rail transport from Kaduna to Lagos may have taken 36 hours but we all knowthat slow and steady wins the race. In any case, why should we be in ahurry to install fast trains when we know the state of power supply here? Has he not promised uninterrupted electricity supply by 2014? So, why not wait?

    In all this, those bent on stopping Jonathan in 2015 should beprepared to floor him on his abysmal failures. They should not beunder any illusion that he would be persuaded to drop an ambition thathe is constitutionally empowered to pursue. He has told them in clear language that he knows his rights and would insist on those rights. Hesaid he is fixing Nigeria to the best of his knowledge. Just that,sometimes, the best is simply not enough to reignite the kind of electoral rout

    that propelled him into office in 2011. And so, instead of appealing to his sense of judgment or succumbing to the doomsday prediction of afragmented Nigeria should Jonathan contest in 2015, it is more ennobling to get him off the seat by swaying the voters to do it with the power in the thumb. It may be a tough one, but that is the waydemocracy goes. Now that Jonathan has thrown his hat in the ring, itis left for the populace to decide whether or not to queue behind a man with an abysmal record of failing to walk his talk and sitting on his hands while the rot deepens!