The Nation Newspaper

Tag: hypocrisy

  • Muiz Banire’s perfidious hypocrisy

    Muiz Banire’s perfidious hypocrisy

    Since my Advanced Level study years at the Ogun State Polytechnic (now Moshood Abiola Polytechnic), Abeokuta, in the mid-eighties, I had come to admire one of the quotes in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803-1882) “The Conduct of Life.” The edifying book is a collection of essays published in 1860. Emerson was the first American author known to receive payment for delivering a talk when he was paid $5 and oats for his horse.

    The quote, which can be found on page 91 of the book, goes thus: ‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.’ The nuance of this quote was what came to my mind since the newest “political saint” in the Centre of Excellence’s political firmament, Muiz Banire, protégé of Oba Olatunji Hamzat and former Commissioner for Transport/Environment in Lagos State for 12 years, threw all decorum to the winds and in the process, portraying himself to the discernible as hypocritical harbinger of false-hearted struggle against what he calls political ‘imposition’.

    So, when l read his largely duplicitous recent paper delivered in Osogbo, my immediate response was: ‘why would he be writing something that is capable of projecting a party he currently serves as national legal adviser as a bunch of dictators?’

    While still ruminating over the genuineness of his intent, he, symptomatic of a loose cannon – this time in a November 9, 2014 – granted another interview to Premium Times, a popular online newspaper. His latest imprudence was titled: ‘APC may lose Lagos in 2015, National Legal Adviser, Muiz Banire, warns.’ He actually threatened brimstone when asked to name those he accused of using state resources to promote personal political causes. He declared: ‘We are going to define that very soon. Any time from December 3rd, we’ll start defining and documenting it appropriately.’

    When asked if Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s influence is waning, particularly in Lagos APC, he said: ‘Number one, APC is a new creation, it’s not ACN. APC is a much bigger party, and it’s a conglomeration of several interests. So, to that extent, one person cannot be in charge again. So for now, everybody is in charge, every party member is in charge now unlike before. So that’s the difference.’ And surprisingly, Muiz deludingly thought himself to be one of those in charge, may be because he had the undeserving privilege of imposing candidates in the past.

    His final word in the interview was that the people should not ‘feel intimidated by anybody because nobody is god.’ He equally stated that he believes that ‘…. we have equal rights to aspire to anything. And you need not have any godfather before you can be anything, particularly in APC.’ Let him tell the world the true statement of his bank statement in 1999 and whatever he is today is courtesy of Oba Hamzat and particularly Asiwaju. What are these people to this man of ingratitude?

    Banire’s outbursts are covert vituperations on Asiwaju Tinubu, former Lagos governor and political iconoclast. Let me quickly state here that while Tinubu is fallible, being a human but Banire is an ungrateful element masquerading as champion of the people. What should be of concern is that Banire, for obvious selfish political reasons, has chosen to wash in public what he has overtime consistently benefited from. If he thinks he would at the end of the day benefit from his own hypocrisy by destroying Asiwaju, his waterloo awaits him.

    Banire is the type of self professed leader that Nigerians, especially Lagosians should be wary of in 2015 and beyond. Lagosians do not deserve any young man who chooses to lead by precept rather than example. It is necessary at this juncture to give an adumbrated dissection of how this former poor ‘toddler’ lecturer (yes, he was a mister when he joined government) came into the political limelight of Lagos. He rode on the political influence of his mentor/godfather, Oba Hamzat, father of current Commissioner for Works in the state, to win Asiwaju’s confidence. In fact, Tinubu was reticent when Banire was recommended to him by Kabiyesi Hamzat who was using him as the caretaker (rent collector) for his estates and also to write minutes of meeting at political gatherings.

    That was how he gained inroad, first as special adviser and later as commissioner for transportation in the Tinubu administration before he was later nominated by Asiwaju into the BRF government in his first term. He ended by spending 12 years in government. All he achieved was through recommendations from godfathers and after some years, he sees himself as a stalwart in Mushin area where he became a ‘master of imposition’, relying largely, on his reviled Tinubu influence within the party. It is surprising to read the same Banire saying as the Lagos APC primaries approach: ‘There is a tendency of imposition on the people…So, I believe that it must not even be allowed to happen now, even if it had been happening in the past. It is not progressive.’ At what time did Banire realise that imposition was not progressive? May be at the point where he believes he has made so much money because we know that he was far from being comfortable before he joined government when he was a proud owner of a ramshackle automobile.

    Whoever doubts Banire’s profile as a master of imposition should go to his constituency in Mushin. Seye Oladejo, former chairman of Mushin Local Government and now Special Adviser, Commerce and Industry was a victim of Banire’s highhandedness. But for Asiwaju’s good sense of judgement, the man would not today be in the BRF government. It was BRF that nominated him but Banire wrote a letter to Asiwaju, threatening to leave the party if Oladejo was given the slot. He does not even have simple courtesy for the governor. For goodness sake, how do we qualify what Banire wanted Tinubu to do for him then if not master imposition? Up till today, this deceitful chief campaigner against imposition in APC is a leading light in that direction since he still writes names of ‘who gets what’ without recourse to the people. Yet, he talks about popular candidates when he was not even popular when Kabiyesi Hamzat rescued him from hustling in life.

    Let us ask Banire if he is ready to henceforth follow due process himself. The other time when his ‘anointed candidate’ was not elected speaker of the House of Assembly, he threw decorum to the dogs because his bid to impose, as godfather himself, his will on the House failed. Also, he opposed Yemi Ali in Mushin Odi-Olowo but Tinubu stood his ground against his whims and caprices. This same man tried to smuggle at least four persons into BRF’s government without the governor’s consent. In the current ensuing Lagos governorship race, Banire says as ‘a national officer of the party, we are meant to be neutral,’ but his partisan neutrality knows who he does not want and that person according to him is the ‘so-called anointed candidate (Akinwunmi Ambode).’ What is the definition of this unjustifiable insolence?

    Banire is fast becoming a misguided element that lacks the moral suasion to be in the vanguard of fight against imposition. Was it not through imposition that he became the national legal adviser of ACN and now APC? All those queuing behind him in his current outbursts, known and unknown had been at one time or the other beneficiaries of imposition from Asiwaju and by extension, the progressives’ leadership. His act of venting his spleen on Ambode, smacks of undue pride from a man who has acquired and is still acquiring so much from Tinubu and the progressive platform that he unthinkably wants to destroy because of selfish political ambitions.

    Banire is a pious hypocrite posturing as virtuous. Anything that is not for him, in his warped view, is not democratic. He preaches the rule of law while his eyes are on the Lagos governorship that is far beyond his egotistic grip. Of course, yours sincerely knows that for people like him, there is always a hidden agenda. But he must realise one naked fact: The hypocrite is naturally doomed!

  • Hypocrisy against stomach infrastructure

    Hypocrisy against stomach infrastructure

    ‘To govern without reflecting is like eating without digesting’ – Edmund Burke

    Stomach infrastructure has become the most over-flogged phrase in the country today. Hitherto, we had, under the military rule, phrases such as ‘new breed’, ‘equal joiner, equal founder’, ‘no-go areas’, ‘ouster clauses’, ‘annulment’ and ‘interim injunction’, among others. The new phrase of stomach infrastructure is consequent upon the June 21 election in Ekiti State in which Ayodele Fayose won over incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi. This column is restating its earlier position in a recent piece that the election was free and fair.

    One salient fact that most antagonists of the concept have over-looked is that stomach infrastructure and physical infrastructure are all ingredients of good governance. They are mutually symbiotic. The state needs empirical infrastructure that will make it effectively function, while the people need basic things of life like food, clothing and shelter to sustain life in the wilderness of humanity. In better managed climes, food is essentially cheap and there are social safety nets to take care of the aged, children and the needy. This column doubts if the same is the case in any part of the country.

    It is bad policy prioritisation to embark on physical development solely without deeply considering the general wellbeing of the majority of the people as well, in a country where unemployment is astronomically high and poverty rampant. Edmund Burke, a British parliamentarian and thinker, once said: “Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.” It is only through “empowering” of the people through provision of social safety nets, generation of jobs and others that public concurrence with generally beneficial public projects can be gotten. But most governors are not doing these forgetting that what will resolve the problems of the country is not misplaced and deceitful executive tight-fistedness. The reality is that what is killing the nation is corruption in high places through awards of bogus contracts to cronies and which is making ordinary Nigerian folks green with envy.

    Like Burke argued, it is necessary to create an expense that he sees as being an essential part in a true economy. These were not done by the states and to compound the problems, civil servants are being owed arrears of salaries/allowances just because most of the states claim to be embarking on developmental projects. The projects are indeed necessary for societal improvement but with a caveat: What is the essence of building roads when public transportation is non-existent? Of what value are built hospitals and schools, in the name of physical infrastructure, when most parents and other inhabitants cannot send their wards to such schools and hospitals because of prohibitive fees and unaffordable medical bills? Most emerging governors lose their political goodwill amongst their people because they simply haughtily feel because they are embarking on building these visible projects, the people should starve to death.

    They embark on illegality, under the guise of unconstitutional financial probity and projects implementation, by denying local governments their monthly allocations and in the process, not allowing the booty of governance to percolate down to the grassroots. Such shamefully unimpeded new attitude by so called democrats in the public affairs of the nation, is tantamount to saying that simply because the head of a family has saved enough to build a house and in the course of such project, the entire family must starve until the project is completed. That kind of policy can only engender serious dissent within any household and that is what is happening in most states across the federation, where most governors resort to frugality under the guise of embarking on developmental projects with money borrowed, through bonds in most cases, on behalf of the people. No wonder the people are rebelling against them now!

    No one, who has witnessed hunger at one point or the other during his or her life time, will agree that the people of Ekiti State erred by voting Fayose in as governor-elect. Nobody who has had difficulty with school fees will quarrel with any university student or the public that runs after a governorship candidate that is giving out bags of rice. Even if those bags of rice were doled out with the condition that voter’s card must be procured by the beneficiary, the fact that on the day of election votes will be secretly cast still gives voters latitude to use his discretion. There is the need for our leaders to play democracy that is ingrained in the cultures and traditions of the people.

    We need strong institutions and good governance but the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this laudable objectives. The leader needs consent of people through their votes to get to office while the latter need someone to chart a course of action for them. This is why a good leader must give majority of his people a sincere sense of belonging; otherwise, such leader gets alienated from the people. No good leader must be perceived to be bidding at an auction of popularity that could lead to his failure, in the construction of the state, to be no longer required at election period. When such things happen, the leader becomes the instruments, not the guide, of the people and becomes irrelevant in the scheme of things.

    The issue of stomach infrastructure brings this column down to need to call on students/scholars of political science to study leaders who, while in the saddle, have successfully combined execution of physical infrastructure with stomach infrastructure. One of such leaders is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, former governor of Lagos State. He was, as helmsman of the Centre of Excellence, able to embark on solid road construction, building of hospitals and skill acquisition centres; pursuit of lofty transportation/traffic policies; development of the environment so as to make it safe for living among others.

    Yet, he still did well in providing stomach infrastructure for majority of Lagosians. It was on this crest of goodwill that he rode to install a successor in incumbent Governor Babatunde Fashola against the tyranny of the ruling federal People’s Democratic Party (PDP) that was hell-bent on winning the state in the 2007 and 2011 general elections.  The same goodwill Asiwaju deployed in ensuring in the past four years that the southwest was regained by proponents of Awoism. Even that great sage, Papa Obafemi Awolowo realised the importance of stomach infrastructure as depicted by several of his party men and people that were empowered in diverse ways during his era as political leader of the southwest.

    It is sheer greed and senseless frugality that would make a governor not want to show humanity for his people under the guise of pursuit of projects. What is very clear is that there is the need to reflect while governing in order not to lose touch with economic and political realities. Let us all know that leadership in this country derive their powers from the people and such leadership must show good understanding of the political cultures/traditions of the societies and to make the people’s wellbeing its primary area of focus. Let it be known that stomach infrastructure will still recur in the coming 2015 general elections. Those governors that are hastily realising its importance should be better prepared. It is a new order that can’t be ignored!

  • Re: Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men

    Re: Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men

    SIR: I think Kingsley Ogbeide-Ihema spoke the mind of many people when he said “if you offer a fool the liberty of your silence, he would offer to himself the liberty of your consent”. I consider it appropriate to salute Dr. Reuben Abati, Special Adviser, Media and Publicity to the President for his well articulated rejoinder titled “Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men” in the Sunday edition of The Nation of February 3.

    It’s a pity we find ourselves in a nation where those who were once involved in the system now turn themselves into ‘messianic’ political icons and professional fault-finders. This group of yesterday’s men and women think that without them in government, the ship of leadership will derail.

    I was in school when one of those yesterday’s women superintended over the educational sector as minister. During her tenure, we saw the mass production of ‘dis-educated, mis-educated and uneducated’ graduates in Nigeria. Those who gained admission into the four walls of the university left with only one wall standing. Under her watchful eyes, the menace of examination malpractices reached an unprecedented dimension. Incessant strike action punctured our academic calendars to the extent that four years courses stretched up to five or six years. The result was that the general public lost confidence in public academic institutions completely.

    This woman who should have been banned from public office for life in view of her abysmal failure in the educational sector now claims to see what she could not see few years ago. Nigerians should not forget that she was a part of the federal executive council that spent over $16 billion on power, yet the only thing we got in return was darkness. Those who think I am wrong should please check their history books.

    • Ehi G.O.

    Benin City.

     

  • Governors’ hypocrisy on LG autonomy

    Sir: Let me start by referring to a newspaper report captioned, Reps, Govs’ rift deepens over Constitution review where the House Spokesman, Hon. Zakari Mohammed was quoted as saying that “This issue of Local Government autonomy as far as Nigeria is concerned is long over due, arising from our public sessions as true representatives of the people; our constituents do not agree with the current status where local government funds are being pilfered by governors at the expense of the people and chairmen who are seen as mere boys for the job. We would certainly not accept a situation where governors turned themselves into demi-gods in the name of Joint Account”.

    A cursory look at the House of Representative initiative to sound the opinion of the 360 federal constituencies on the amendment of the constitution indicate that Nigerians have come out in favour of political and fiscal autonomy to local government councils. There was also a general consensus that the so-called State/LG Joint account should be abolished while elected council officials will enjoy a minimum of 3-4 years tenure, that INEC take over the conduct of LG poll from state electoral commission, e.t.c.

    However, we were taken aback to learn that our governors have chosen to swim against the tide of public opinion, vowing to frustrate the aspirations of the people by intimidating their state of assembly members against the wishes of Nigerians.

    The question is, why is it that our governors are becoming autocratic, dictatorial, greedy and hypocritical? Hypocritical in the sense that what they don’t want the federal government to do to them as a second tier government is what they want done to the third tier. It was Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi who highlighted the hypocritical posturing of the governors when he stated that “ when all the governors spoke with one voice for a change, I got worried. But it sounds schizophrenic that governors are consistent in loudly advocating that the powers and financial allocation to the centre should be reduced, that the Federal Government should get off their backs, and yet, at the same time, they are not prepared to sanction and recognize the autonomous status for the third tier of government”.

    Senator Ike Ekweremadu in a recent paper on “Repositioning the Local Government System for Sustainable Development through constitution Review” wrote: “In 2002, the state governments brought a suit against the Federal Government for deducing first line charges for Joint Venture investments in the oil sector, Nigerian and National Petroleum Corporation priority projects, National priority projects and external department services. While the Supreme Court judgement favoured the state governments, it appears that most states are guilty of the same act as the local government in many instance, have continued to suffer Fiscal emasculation in the hand of the state government”.

    We are therefore calling on the members of federal and state assemblies to guide against any unwholesome influence to undermine the wishes of Nigerians. Anything short of granting autonomy to local government councils will amount to betraying the popular expectations of the People.

    • Jeff Nkwocha

    Warri, Delta State

  • Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men

    Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men

    A loosely bound group of yesterday’s men and women seems to be on the offensive against the Jonathan administration. They pick issues with virtually every effort of the administration, pretending to do so in the public interest; positing that they alone, know it all. Arrogantly, they claim to be better and smarter than everyone else in the current government. They are ever so censorious, contrarian and supercilious. They have no original claim to their pretensions other than they were privileged to have been in the corridors of power once upon a time in their lives. They obviously got so engrossed with their own sense of importance they began to imagine themselves indispensable to Nigeria. It is dangerous to have such a navel-gazing, narcissistic group inflict themselves with so much ferocity on an otherwise impressionable public. We are in reality dealing with a bunch of hypocrites.

    With exceptions so few, they really don’t care about Nigeria as a sovereign but the political spoils that accrue from it. And so they will stop at nothing to discredit those they think are not as deserving as they imagine themselves to be. President Jonathan has unfairly become the target of their pitiable frustrations.

    Underneath their superfluous appearance, lies an unspoken class disdain directed at the person and office of a duly elected president of the country. It is a Nigerian problem, perhaps. In the same advanced societies which these same yesterday men and women often like to refer to, public service is seen and treated as a privilege. People are called upon to serve; they do so with humility and great commitment, and when it is all over, they move on to other things. The quantity surveyor returns to his or her quantity surveying or some other decent work; the lawyer to his or her wig and gown; the university teacher, to the classroom, glad to have been found worthy of national service. When and where necessary, as private citizens they are entitled to use the benefit of this experience to contribute to national development, they speak up on matters of public importance not as a full-time job as is the case in Nigeria currently.

    What then, is the problem with us? As part of our governance evolution, most people become public servants by accident, but they soon get so used to the glamour of office that they lose sight of their own ordinariness. They use the system to climb: to become media celebrities, to gain international attention and to morph into self-appointed guardians of the Nigerian estate. They mask self interest motives as public causes and manipulate the public’s desire for improvements in their daily struggles as opportunity for power grab.

    They are perpetually hanging around, lobbying and hustling for undeserved privileges. They exploit ethnic and religious connections where they can or join political parties and run for political office. They even write books (I, me and myself books, packaged as cerebral stuff); if that still doesn’t work, they lobby newspaper houses for columns to write and they become apostolic pundits pontificating on matters ranging from the nebulous to the non-descript. Power blinds them to the reality that we are all in this together and we have a unique opportunity to do well for the taxpayers and hardworking electorate that provide every public official the privilege to serve.

    Unsatisfied with the newspaper columns, they open social media accounts and pretend to be voices of wisdom seeking to cultivate an angry crowd which they feed continually with their own brand of negativity. They arrange to give lectures at high profile events where they abuse the government of the day in order to gain attention and steal a few minutes in the sun; hoping to force an audience that may ‘open doors’ for them, back into the corridors of power. These characters are in different sizes and shapes: small, big; Godfathers, agents, proxies. The tactics of the big figures on this rung of opportunism may be slightly different. They parade themselves as a Godfather or kingmaker or the better man who should have been king. They suffer of course, from messianic delusions. The fact that they boast of some followership and the media often treats them as icons, makes their nuisance factor worse. They and their protégés and proxies are united by one factor though: their hypocrisy.

    It is in the larger interest of our country that the point be made that the government of the day welcomes criticism and political activism. This is an aspect of our emergent democracy that expands on the growing freedom of expression, thought and association but there is need for caution and vigilance, lest we get taken hostage by the architects of odious disinformation. Nigerians must not allow any group of individuals to hold this country to ransom and no one alone should appropriate the right to determine what is best for Nigeria. The accidental public servants who have turned that privilege into a life-long obsession and profession must be told to go get a life and find meaningful work to do.

    Those who believe that no one else can run Nigeria without them must be told to stop hallucinating. The former Ministers, former Governors, former DGs, and all sorts who have been busy quoting mischievous figures, spreading cruel propaganda must be reminded that the Jonathan administration is in fact trying to clean up the mess that they created. They want to own the game when the ball is not in their possession. They want to be the referee when nobody has offered them a whistle. They seek to play God, forgetting that the case for God is not in the hands of man. One of the virtues of enlightenment is for persons to have a true perspective of their own location in the order of things. What they do not seem to realise or accept is that the political climate has changed.

    When one of them was in charge of this same estate called Nigeria, he shut down the Port Harcourt airport and other airports for close to two years under the guise of renovation. The Port Harcourt airport was abandoned for so long it was overgrown with weeds after serving for months as a practice ground for motoring schools. It was reopened without any improvement and with so much money down the drain, and the pervasive suspicion that the reason it was shut down in the first place was to create a market for a new airline that had been allowed the monopoly use of the other airport in the city. Under President Jonathan, airports across the country are being upgraded, rebuilt and modernized; in less than two years, the transformation is self-evident. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy from our see-no-good commentators comes from the one who superintended over the near-collapse of the aviation sector who is now audacious enough to claim to be a social critic.

    For the first time since 1999, the Nigerian Railway Corporation is up and running as a service organization. The rail lines have become functional from Lagos to Kano; Ewekoro to Minna, and very soon, from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, Abuja to Kaduna and Lagos to Ibadan. They couldn’t do this in their time, now they are busy looking for money that is not missing with their teeth. When questions are asked, they claim they invented the ideas of due process and accountability. They once promised to solve the crisis of electricity supply in Nigeria. But what did they do? They managed to leave the country in darkness with less than 2,000 MW; abandoned independent power projects, mismanaged power stations, and uncompleted procurement processes. The mess was so bad their immediate successors had to declare an emergency in the power sector. It has taken President Jonathan to make the difference. Today, there is greater coherence in the management of the power sector with power supply in excess of 4, 200 MW; a better conceived power sector road map is running apace, and the administration is determined to make it better. They complain about the state of the roads. Most of the contracts were actually awarded under their watch to the tune of billions! They talk about corruption, yet many of them have thick case files with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the courts and the police on corruption-related charges. One of them was even accused of having awarded choice plots of government land to himself, his wives, his companies and other relations when he was in charge of such allocations! Really, have we forgotten so soon?

    These yesterday men and women certainly don’t seem to care very much about the Nigerian taxpayer who has had to bear the brunt of the many scandals this administration is exposing in its bid to clear out the Augean stable. They’d rather grandstand with the ex-General this, Chief that, Doctor this and ex-(dis)Honourable Minister who has no record of what he or she did with the funds the nation provided them to deliver results to protect our interest so that we don’t end up continuing to make the same wasteful mistakes.

    It is enough to make you shudder at the thought of any of them being part of government with access to the public purse; but then we’ve already seen what some of them are capable of doing when in control of public money, authority and influence; and to that the people have spoken in unison – they have had enough. Nigerians are wiser and are now familiar with the trickery from these persons whose claim to fame and fortune was on the back of their public service.

    Our point at the risk of overstating what is by now too obvious: We have too many yesterday men and women behaving too badly. We are dealing with a group of power-point technocrats who have mastered the rhetoric of public grandstanding: carefully crafted emotion-laden sound bites passed off as meaningful engagements. That is all there is to them, after many years of hanging around in relevant places and mingling in the right corridors, all made possible through the use/abuse of Nigeria. Our caveat to their audience is the same old line: let the buyer beware!

     

    Dr. Abati is Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to President Goodluck Jonathan

     

  • Labour’s hypocrisy and Nigeria’s condition

    Labour’s hypocrisy and Nigeria’s condition

    SIR: When I hear talks about revolution, secession and mass actions in Nigeria, I sometimes feel sad. Do we really need the most expensive form of revolution when there are cheaper options?

    Well, I think secession and revolution remains some of the last options where other approaches have failed. The question we should ask is have we even explored any option and it failed aside the convention of taking money from politicians, voting them and expecting a bribe giver to do wonders?

    Having looked deeply into what could be wrong with us, I realized that power, not only political, have kept falling in wrong places and that is why we keep getting the most undesirable results from all ends.

    Pressure groups like labour unions led by indecent, corrupt, inefficient, conscienceless and thoughtless rogues are as bad as the most corrupt governments on the surface of this planet, whether we like it or not.

    I may be wrong but I will not fail to express my views about the labour movement in Nigeria as a pressure group with particular reference to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC).

    I assume that only a labour movement led by a league of demented, intellectually bereaved, cruel, self-seeking and pretentious creatures, will keep embarking on strike actions indiscriminately just for wage increase, price reduction on commodities like fuel et al and yet seeing that these agitation have never changed the life of an average decent worker who does not live on filths from corrupt practices should remain calm by never acknowledging and protesting the principal causes of the poverty among the workers whose interest the movement is meant to protect.

    It is by my perception absurd to see that NLC and other unions in Nigeria have remained quiet about inadequacies of government in the provision of basic infrastructures and social amenities thus, culminating in extreme hardship for workers, both in the private and public sector, because of the avoidable costs the citizens incur in provision of alternative sources of power supply, water, healthcare, education among others.

    It is regrettable to state with all pessimism that aside those who are unfortunate to be part of the corrupt business circle, Nigerian workers will remain poorer than they are regardless of the wage increase their spent and extremely corrupt labour movement struggles to achieve for them because the cost of attending to government’s failure by far exceeds the salaries of the highest paid personnel in most public offices.

    It is my sincere and patriotic wish that Nigerians will one day realise that the labour movement, as a pressure group, is a veritable tool that can be used in spearheading a non-violent revolution and yet emerge stronger than we are if the movement is lead by patriotic men and not the class that it currently parades.

     

    • Adenuga Abiodun Oladimeji,

    Imeko, Ogun State.

  • Sanusi Lamido’s hypocrisy

    Sanusi Lamido’s hypocrisy

    SIR: Why is Sanusi Lamido Sanusi so controversial? Why must this Central Bank Governor (CBN) be stirring up the hornet’s nest every now and then? Is it in his gene or star or both? Does he revel in it? His tenure has been marred by controversies.

    If he is not quarrelling with members of the National Assembly over their pay package, he’s busy supporting fuel hike price. If he’s not donating towards an opaque cause, he’s planning to introduce 5000 Naira new notes. Now his new fancy is in advising the Federal Government to reduce the civil service work force by about fifty percent as part of measures to reflate the economy. Is he idle as suggested by Peter Isele, President of the Trade Union Congress (UTC)? Who will save this man from himself? Obviously, not even the President can probably do that.

    The National Assembly may be right after all in its attempt to amend the CBN laws apparently to curb the excesses of the Governor. If Saint Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is bold and sincere enough, let him go ahead and show the whole world the pay structure of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) staff. Nigerians would be scandalized and alarmed to know the hefty nature of their salaries and other perquisites especially those at the Director cadre.

    A friend of mine recently and perhaps out of excitement called to tell me about his promotion as a Director in the CBN. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, he disclosed that his new status would fetch him 130000 Naira as Newspapers/Magazines allowance and 200000 Naira as Generator allowance. These are just two categories of the many other allowances not stated here. And they are on monthly basis! He would

    be given about 4million Naira vehicle loan etc. I must confess that at a point, I switched off the phone because the figures he was reeling out were incredible and mind boggling.

    After a day or two, my friend called back again to know why I did what I did the last time we interacted on the phone. My response was that I would have fainted if I had allowed him to state all the full packages and entitlements. I further told him that my salary per month is not even as big as his generator allowance even though I’m a senior civil servant on salary

    Grade Level 16!

    The intriguing thing is that these allowances are exclusive of their actual monthly salaries. Your guess therefore is as good as mine. However, it is not certain if my friend is truthful because there is no documentary evidence to back this up; he could be pulling my legs or trying to impress. It’s now left for the CBN Governor to tell us that this is true or not true. And if it is true, then will Sanusi be justified to demand for a 50 percent cut in the workforce? Why would the sacrifice not start from the CBN under his watch before asking the helpless civil servants to be taken to Golgotha?

    • Ogidiolu Ajayi,

    Asokoro, Abuja.