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![[OPINION] Ministering to Maalu with 774 heads - Festus Adedayo](/media/k2/items/cache/23981dc6797428331fa5ddb3d02de22f_L.jpg)
THE Iloko, offspring of Arelu, (Iloko Omo Arelu) are held in awe in Yorubaland. For a people who fought one another in internecine wars that began in 1793 and lasted for almost a century, Yoruba give effusion of reverences to people with unusual bravery. Their reverence for the Iloko however comes from this clan’s queer and odd brand of bravery: Spillage of blood. The Iloko earned their renown from decapitation of heads. They cut off human heads with magisterial finish, holding the familial history of being the king’s executioner. In ancient England, as execution of enemies of the monarchy was done through the guillotine, in the Oyo Empire, it was done by the Iloko with sword. Iloko harvested multiple cognomens on account of their deft beheadings. They were the meticulous Cutter of heads, the Bé’ríolá (one who relishes decapitation) and whose swords guzzle blood. The Iloko is one who, even if the sword is as pint-sized as a Kèmbè short, masterfully uses that sword to decapitate his in-laws. His rationalization for beheading one with whom he shares matrimonial bloodline is, whoever gives one their child to marry is the rightful one to behead.
A verse in Iloko’s cognomen recitation depicts their bloodthirstiness. When other farmers cultivate yearly hectares of plantations of maize, okra, yam and “òsìbànbà tí ńbe l’órùn ebè”, the Iloko mock these farmers’ naivety of true essence of farming. To demonstrate how farming should be done, the Iloko dug thousands of heaps. Therein, he buried decapitated heads like yam heads. Unfortunately, the heads refused to sprout. When his attention was called to the barrenness of his planted seedlings, the Iloko’s excuse was that every human creation, including animals, has their own setbacks! The paradox came when the Iloko ran afoul of the king’s laws and he was slated for execution. The Iloko then stretched his legs and hands pleadingly and demanded from the executioner which of his body parts would be cut off: the hands or legs?
Last week, in my J. F Odunjo and the hunger this time, I reflected the acute hunger ravaging Nigeria. It is an understatement to say that many of our countrymen are dying of hunger. Some wander aimlessly on the streets, uttering indecipherable monologues, dialogues with God-knows-who. Some are locked up in sanatoria, their sanity dispossessed of them as a result of social de-masculinity. Once cohesive homes lose the social glue that gums them in amity; no thanks to the emptiness of their pantries. Financial impotence is leading to husbands losing their manhood, causing katakata in homes. Many once prude wives are now delectable prawns on adulterous beds of men with money. Female children are forcibly dispossessed of age-long home values at money point, becoming easy preys to the lures of Sodom. In the midst of this social upheaval, Aso Rock’s tepid and Babelian answers to our affliction of hunger appear like a kick-and-go children community football. Its policies stagger and somersault like a village Burukutu local alcohol drunkard.
Before the ink of my pen dried last week, however, Aso Rock had provided answer to Nigerians’ hunger. Her Excellency the First Lady of Nigeria, Remi Ahmed Tinubu (RAT), immediately moved to her backyard inside her expansive powerhouse abode. Therefore, she emerged with solutions. She planted okra, ewedu, waterleaf, green vegetable, lemon grass and bitter leaf. She even suddenly became a doctor. Like a knowledgeable medic, RAT clinically told us how measles can be cured by eating ewedu. For ulcer, said the medic, plenty waterleaf is answer. No contribution to the national food drive could be greater.
Less than a week after, the Nigerian president, Bola Ahmed-Tinubu (BAT) also came up with government’s response to the stasis in Nigeria’s agriculture. Last Tuesday, he announced the creation of a new Ministry of Livestock Development. Its establishment was part of the recommendations of ex-Kano State Governor and Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Abdullahi Ganduje-led National Livestock Reforms Committee. Then, he appointed a herder in academic gown, Prof Attahiru Jega as co-chair of the committee. With Ganduje and Jega, Tinubu is prepared for the hara-kiri of sacrificing a child of Ore to the Ore deity.
President BAT and Madam RAT’s responses to the acute hunger in the land possess features similar to the Iloko. Is this couple of Iloko descent? It is only Iloko who plant human heads in heaps in the guise of yam seedlings. The way the Aso Rock couple is going about this hunger quench drive, rather than okra, ewedu, waterleaf, green vegetable, lemon grass and bitter leaf, they may need to dig more millions of heaps and furrows. Dry heads of hungry Nigerians may occupy those heaps. Does Madam RAT not know that home gardening is too tokenistic, too tiny an offering to propitiate to the god of acute hunger that ravages Nigeria? I also see the Iloko paradox in BAT’s Ministry of Maalu (cows). In demanding from his executioner which of his body parts would be cut off, the Iloko executioner conflated a process he jolly well knew to be wrong. He then deliberately chose to sell a dummy of personal naivety to his nemesis. Does President BAT actually believe that a ministry of livestock is response to our hunger? And it is a response to the farmer-herder crisis that has ravaged Nigeria for close to a decade now? Do BAT and RAT, like Iloko, take pleasure in hunger literally decapitating Nigerians?
It looks like this is a season when our own bat is being smoked out by owls, hawks and snakes, the bat’s greatest predators. Chiropterologists (scientists who study bats) reveal that, apart from these predators, the greatest threat to the bat is a disease called the white-nose syndrome. It is a white fungus that perches on the muzzle and wings of bats and which affects their hibernation. In Canada, white-nose has killed 90% of one of bat’s species. It was detected in 37 states and seven Canadian provinces. In Nigeria, the cause of our unprecedented inflation in history is ascribed to a disease called white-nose. It afflicts our BAT and its prognosis is Bretton Woods’ economic prescriptions. With them, the beak-nosed economists hold our bat by its balls.
Within Nigeria, the bat is also facing demonic predators. They come too in the form of owls, hawks and snakes. It is Northern Nigeria. For a man who said his life-long ambition was becoming the Nigerian president, the North is intent on putting sand-sand inside BAT’s second term gari. The northern anger is manifest. Afro-haired Twitter minstrel, Shehu Sanni, alerted us to this. That northern adder – Nasir El-Rufai, and his irreverent-tongued legislator child are fighting like a decapitated venomous snake. While the father is sending cryptic messages laced with apocalypse on X, the son is spitting venom like a badly-brought-up puppy spits saliva. BAT is their target. His northern enemies are also coalescing. Recently, we saw an elésìnrìn (worthless) pilgrimage to Daura, where the most effete of Nigerian leaders in modern history lives. Nasir, the adder, was also there to offer his infamous kneeling before powerful leaders. Shakespeare predicted this coalesce in Julius Caesar: “It is the bright day that brings forth the adder and that craves wary walking.” BAT’s bad governance of the last one year has brought forth the adder of flip-flops that dog his path.
Not minding its ambiguity, the North is also using the Samoa agreement as ploy for re-grouping of bile. In the Senate last week, the North had scathing words for BAT. Ali Ndume, who in 2021 was quizzed for his alleged romance with Boko Haram, complained that the Lagos Boy runs a government that blocked access to quality advice. So also Ahmad Lawan who complained that Tinubu’s policies “have caused hunger and unbearable hardships.” Wonders seem to have ended! Like sharks that can smell blood hundreds of meters ahead, the north has smelled a BAT wall with huge cracks opened by misgovernance. This was a region that kept mute for eight years as Buhari picked his teeth and drifted into deep sleep. It preened its feathers like an Odidere bird when BAT announced a presidential Muslim-Muslim ticket. What it didn’t know was that BAT is just a jolly good fellow who enjoys good life. Full stop! Those Islamic religious prescriptions the sons of Uthman Dan Fodio thought he would help them fight mean nothing to him.
The kitchen is now getting hotter. The North’s opportunist alangba (lizard) must poke its nose inside this man-made crack to feed on ants. What could not be achieved under a Muhammadu Buhari whose greatest joy on earth was to own cows in his ranch is now being pushed under a man who hails from where the philosophy is not to bow for the cow for the sake of its meat. For the jolly good fellow, to dobale (prostrate) to the maalu so as to have access to its meat is a moral non-starter. It is immaterial. Establishing a Federal Ministry of Maalu is a dobale to the maalu. Perhaps this will appease the children of Fodio?
The wisdom in establishing a Maalu ministry is very far between. If the motive is to placate the north for a second term, does the Iloko know that blackmailers, all over the world, are insatiable? Blackmailers are akin to the proverbial wastrel child, the Omolokun, who won’t rest until it demands his parents’ life. Second, as has been revealed over the years, herders are terrorists who do not deserve human pity. The kernel in that alleged statement from Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is eternal: “It is God’s prerogative to forgive terrorists but my own business is to dispatch them to Him.” Yes, insecurity has decimated food security in Nigeria, with food inflation cruising at frightening altitude. What Nigeria needs now isn’t a beatification of terrorists, nor pandering to a set of people by a government afraid of re-election. By the way, which brand of federalism do we practice in Nigeria where a federal government that has no livestock under its umbrella creates a ministry of livestock?
As last week got set to wind up, the Iloko got decked in victory regalia. The Supreme Court announced that the executioner has secured yet another 774 heads to plant on his heaps. Thirty-six heads of state governors were already in the kitty, demonized and tar-brushed as enemies of the struggle for a better Nigeria. We must thank the Iloko for this victory against our governor-vassals who have turned local governments into their backyard farming. It is to the 774 heads we must look up to for redemption of our decadent infrastructure, impassable roads, payment of teachers’ salaries, council workers’ salaries, gratuities, new minimum wage and others. It is the greatest victory yet for the Iloko whose sword is law. As the Oyo state governor, Seyi Makinde, brilliantly remarked, “The Supreme Court’s judgment…is a distraction; we need to face the real issues we have. Nigeria is not productive. There is hunger and anger in the land.”
We hope, with this judgment, Betta Edu will now be taken to court to answer to the charge of allegedly siphoning N585.2 million from the Humanitarian Affairs ministry and that gari will now be within the reach of the common man. God bless this Supreme Court judgment that will make hunger a thing of the past in Nigeria.
![[OPINION] Rule by judges is not rule of law - Chidi Anselm Odinkalu](/media/k2/items/cache/ccdc8b582171052de977d68802ef88ac_L.jpg)
“The judiciary has immense power. In the nature of things, judges cannot be democratically accountable for their decisions. It therefore matters very much that their role should be regarded as legitimate by the public at large” — Jonathan Sumption, Law in a Time of Crisis, 121 (2021).
For a cumulative period of 17 years between 1885 and 1905, Hardinge Giffard – who was better known as Lord Halsbury – served three tenures as Lord Chancellor. In this capacity, he earned a reputation for having “appointed many undistinguished men to the bench because of their political services to the Conservative Party.” In 1897, Lord Salisbury, one of the prime ministers under whom Lord Halsbury served, advised him that “the judicial salad requires both legal oil and political vinegar; but disastrous effects will follow if due proportion is not observed.” For having so manifestly got the proportions out of kilter, Nigeria could be on course for a date Lord Salisbury’s predicted effects.
Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital, is a place where mutual intercourse between lawyers, politicians and judges is both natural and habitual. It is home to judges too numerous to count and host to the headquarters of many court systems, including the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT High Court) as well as of Nigeria’s Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. The headquarters of the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS Court of Justice) is also in Abuja.
The pace of production and reproduction in the courts in Abuja has been rather dizzying recently. On the penultimate day of the past working week, Nigeria’s supreme court in a case instituted by the federal government against the states issued a decision designed to make it mandatory for local government to be run only by elected officials. This judgment has unlocked a predictable scrum of both political ululation and lamentation but the risk remains that its full benefits are likely to be undermined by the well-established jurisprudence of the supreme court in favour of bandit ballots which support the production of leaders at all levels who lack electoral legitimacy.
The day before the supreme court judgment, on the approach to the fourth anniversary of Nigeria’s #EndSARs uprising of 2020, the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled that the conduct of the Nigerian government and its security agencies in their response to the #EndSARS uprising violated the guarantees of “security of person, prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association, duty to investigate human rights violations, and right to effective remedy.” In effect, the court said that the Nigerian government engaged in a cover-up of the violations that occurred during the #EndSARS protests, especially at the Lekki Tollgate in Lagos.
Weighty as they were, both of these otherwise seminal outcomes were relative non-events in the political and judicial registers of Abuja this past week. On the same day that the ECOWAS court delivered its judgment in the #EndSARS case to a near-empty gallery and the day before the supreme court held forth on the destination of local government funds, all roads led to the supreme court where the outgoing chief justice of Nigeria, Olukayode Ariwoola, presided over the inauguration of 22 new justices of the court of appeal and 12 new judges of the FCT high court.
Many people may have missed the number of justices of appeal inaugurated, however. Anyone who followed the reportage would have been forgiven for supposing that there were just two justices of appeal sworn in: “Wike’s wife and 21 others”, a reference to the wife of a political bruiser and current minister of the federal capital territory, Nyesom Wike. Also among the new justices of appeal is Abdullahi Liman, Kano’s self-appointed federal king-maker. The excess political vinegar in some of these most recent elevations to the court of appeal sadly detracts from the tasteful salad among others. For the sake of their own professional and career advancement in a cynical system, it is best at this time to preserve the anonymity of those deserving ones.
Among the 12 new judges of the FCT high court, at least seven were family members of serving or living judicial figures and three were family members of persons directly involved in the appointment process. Among these, the chief justice of Nigeria, who presided over the appointment, had his daughter-in-law made a judge; the chief judge of the FCT high court made his daughter a judge; and the president of the court of appeal got her daughter appointed a high court judge for the second time in three years. In 2021, Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau state made the same daughter a judge of the Plateau State High Court.
Responding to these appointments, Access to Justice, a group that monitors judicial independence and accountability in Nigeria pointedly said that “three candidates were ineligible to be considered for such appointments in the first place at the time the vacancies were announced.” This was about the daughter of the Chief Judge of the FCT High Court; the daughter of the President of the Court of Appeal; and the daughter-in-law of the outgoing Chief Justice of Nigeria. According to the group, these three appointments were a composite transaction between the CJN, the president of the Court of Appeal and the chief judge of the FCT High Court best described in local parlance as: “You scratch my back, I scratch your back.”
To say that these three appointments violate the judicial code of conduct as well as the regulations governing judicial appointments is to be kind to the lack of scruples at the helm of the current judicial appointment process in the country. It makes a joke of the judicial appointment process that someone in Nigeria can be appointed a High Court judge while holding a subsisting appointment as a High Court Judge.
In the days when the Nigerian judiciary was under credible leadership, these judicial inaugurations would pass almost as a non-event, attended only by select staff of the affected courts and by some members of the families of the new appointees. Reflecting the mood and mores of the times and consistent with the current tyranny of perverse incentives in judicial appointments, however, this swearing-in was a carnival taken over by cavalcades of dubious politicians and insider dealers in perverse political influence. Following the formal swearing-in of the new judges, Abuja was littered with “receptions” convoked by politicians and senior lawyers for many of the new judges.
There was good reason for the politicians to make an obligation of their noisy presence at the swearing-in of the new judges. Section 14(2) of Nigeria’s constitution loudly proclaims that “sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria” but under the colour of “rule of law” and judicial independence, the judges have toppled the people and installed themselves as the ones who alone can elect politicians to positions of power and influence in Nigeria. Access to political office now, therefore, is a transaction that begins and rests with political access to judges. Having thus murdered the rule of law, what we now have is a rule by judges under which both political power and judicial office have become bereft of legitimacy. The victim is the public good.
The week ended with a report which said that “[J]udges top [the] list of bribe recipients in Nigeria.” 15 years ago, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights warned that “the courts need the trust of the people in order to maintain their authority and legitimacy. The credibility of the courts must not be weakened by the perception that courts can be influenced by any external pressure.” In Nigeria, this is now a vain hope.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
![[OPINION] Dangote and another Presidential Economic Council - Dele Sobowale](/media/k2/items/cache/1d4d5cfe6c335ab19187e8f4ee688582_M.jpg)
“As a nation, it is so shameful that we have about 4.5 gigawatts. We must increase our oil production too to 2 million barrels per day within the next few months. Remove all barriers hindering investments into the sector to enhance competitiveness” – President Tinubu in Abuja, July 4, 2024.
Watching Tinubu addressing the Council and the nation on television, I felt deeply sorry for one member – Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Chairman, Dangote Group.
Dangote, every government’s nominee to join an Economic Committee hastily assembled in response to a national economic emergency, once more led the private sector contingent.
He has been the automatic choice since 1999.
He has been forced to sit and listen to every President who ostensibly appoints a Committee or Council when, our recent history has demonstrated that they labour in vain.
In reality, by the time the Council members are selected, the most important decisions to be made have already been settled.
I cannot recall a single occasion when the Council has had any significant influence on vital matters.
Buhari serves to illustrate the point that the eminent individuals drafted to serve as presidential economic advisers, by whatever name they are called, invariably, have wasted their precious time.
And, being extremely wealthy, the sitting allowances paid cannot be regarded as value for money – they would have preferred to be doing something more profitable.
Long before Ministers were appointed, in 2015, Buhari inaugurated the Economic Management Team – headed by Vice President Osinbajo.
In addition to the VP, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, was also a member, Dangote was also there, as well as Soludo.
Given the utter failure of the economic policies of Buharinomics, none of the members would want to be reminded that they were part of the team.
The disastrous situation in which Nigeria finds itself stems from the fact that Nigerian presidents appoint Councils or Committees to address problems which the Civil Service, supported by experts and consultants, usually can solve.
WHY COMMITTEES DON’T WORK
“A camel is a horse designed by a Committee… a Committee is a collection of the unfit, appointed by the unwilling to perform the unnecessary” – American wisecracks, VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, VBQ, p 30.
President Jonathan probably set the national record for the appointment of Committees.
Every major problem was referred to a Committee; the first Committee’s report was also referred to another Committee to advise government on what to do.
Only God knows how many reports of Committees, appointed by GEJ, are gathering dust in the archives of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, from that government alone.
Yet, decisions were made regarding those matters.
Among the things we were taught in my MBA course in Boston, 1968-70, is that not specifically making a decision on important matters is also a decision – the decision to do nothing and let things sort themselves out – usually with calamitous results.
Nobody can now possibly know what might have become of Nigeria if Jonathan had sent an Executive Bill to the National Assembly, NASS, after the 2014 Constitutional Review Committee completed its work.
Instead of deciding, he sent it into the tank called another Committee.
Buhari, in 2019, starting the second term of his administration, set up an Economic Advisory Council, EAC, headed by Dr Salami, but including Soludo (again?), Professor Ojowu, Dangote (again?), CBN Governor (again?), etc, without disclosing to them that his government has already raided the CBN to the tune of several trillion naira through illegal Ways & Means, W&M, borrowing.
Obviously, those appointed were only used as window dressing to deceive the public – while the grandest larceny in Nigerian history was underway.
In an article published in September 2019, on this page, titled: Economic Advisory Council: Rescuers or Undertakers? I predicted, quite accurately, that the members were risking their reputations on Buhari who had demonstrated that he lacked the intellect and self-discipline to accept and implement their proposals and that Nigeria would be worse off by the time Buhari left office.
Who among the members of Buhari’s ECA now want to acknowledge the fact that he was part of that Titanic failure?
NEED FOR A PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER ON ANTECEDENTS
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana, 1863-1952, VBQ p 93.
One of the things that are most astonishing about African leaders, especially Nigerians, is how frequently they repeat the same mistakes made by their predecessors; and sometimes with some of the same cast of characters.
The men for all seasons governments select either are not as good as we think they are; or governments are wasting their talents.
To be quite candid, some of those drafted into Tinubu’s Council should decline the appointment – particularly those who served Buhari.
The reason is very simple.
The Presidents who appoint them seldom wait for their advice before making disastrous mistakes.
Already, Tinubu, apart from continuing his predecessor’s “borrow-and-spend” fiscal policy, has already broken Buhari’s awful records on several fronts.
Those of us who thought that no President could be worse than Jonathan must now admit that we were wrong.
Segun Odegbami: How a minister aborted the most ambitious Grassroots Sports Development program in Nigeria’s history
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On the eve of another Olympic Games, I invite the readers of this page to join me and shed their own tears.
Believe it or not, when Dr. Ebele Goodluck Jonathan , GCFR, was President of Nigeria, he approved the establishment of a federal government committee with the singular mandate to revive academicals sports in the country. That means, sports at the grassroots, at secondary schools level – natural feeder to elite sports in the tertiary institutions, Local Governments, States and the national sports councils and associations.
The Honourable Minister of Youth and Sports at the time, inaugurated the committee whose membership included several stakeholders at the secondary schools sports level across the country.
I believe that my background as a product of school sports, owner of the country’s first multi-sports, co-educational secondary school, Chairman of the Governing Council of the country’s only national sports institute, and an active participant in the organization of secondary school sports in the country at the time, earned me the appointment of Chairman.
The President’s mandate was simple – set up the machinery to revive participation in sports in every secondary school in the country. For most members of the committee, particularly those that were instrumental to establishing it, their vision was small – to organise a national football competition for secondary schools, name it after Mr. President and get all State governors to direct their ministries of sports and of education to participate, have grand finale in Abuja and get Mr. President to attend.
It was good, but limited in the scope of what could be achieved additionally with an expansion of the vision.
I saw it as an opportunity to catalyze the biggest grassroots sports development programme in Nigeria with multiple outcomes that will revolutionize sports, take its outcomes beyond academicals level, impact national youth engagement, youth empowerment, encourage enrolment into schools (particularly in the Boko Haram ravaged North East at the time), document all Nigeria’s athletes, create a seamless transition from secondary to tertiary and to professional levels in sports, and so on.
After several months of consultations and conversations with the highest authorities in the country amongst the stakeholders to be involved in this project, and a draft document was scripted capturing the vision and all the details of strategy, funding, implementation, outcomes, a SWOT analysis, and so on, it was clear that the President’s simple and single mandate, escalated, became an exciting trip into uncharted new territories in sports development that would have changed the lives of the youths for good.
It was clear that for the project to succeed there needed to be a general clear understanding by everyone involved in the different parts, with clear roles and responsibilities, a cord connecting all the moving parts in the complex architecture, and a seamless relationship up the ladder of the production line from grassroots to the elite and professional ranks of sports, areas that were outside the direct mandate of the Committee.
The weakest part of the project was the absence of a legislation to give it teeth and a permanent life. The committee was ad-hoc at best, to survive at the whims of any new Minister.
‘Unfortunately’ I was never a small dreamer. I saw beyond the superficial intentions.
With me as pilot, following consultations and meetings, the committee came up with a master plan for deployment to strategic institutions and organizations in the country, without whose buy-in and participation the project would not take off from the tarmac.
At different fora, I led the committee to meet with the Principals of all Federal Government Secondary Schools in the country; all State Ministries of Sports; all State Ministries of Education; Directors of Sports of all State Sports Councils; all Local Governments Sports Councils; the Nigeria Governors’ Forum; all Principals of all public and private Secondary schools in Nigeria; Directors of Sports of Tertiary institutions in Nigeria under NUGA for the Universities, NIPOGA for the Polytechnics, and NACEGA for Colleges of Education; the committee of Vice-Chancellors of Universities; Heads of all military schools in Nigeria; the Directors of Sports in the States education ministries;, the leadership of the Nigeria School Sports Federation, NSSF, that are direct supervisors of academicals sports in Nigeria; and so on. They were all consulted, briefed and integrated into the grand plan that they readily embraced with relief that the President was involved!
The plan was to document all students (and indirectly, all students) in all these institutions interested in participating in any one or more of different sports in their institutions. The documentation will include their full names, home address, date and place of birth, next of kin, institution, course of study, class, sports, blood type, biometrics, and any other information that may be found useful for proper documentation. This data will be universally available and accessible to all the institutions in the country.
Meanwhile, each student athlete would have been given a card (like an ATM card) that will serve several purposes. This card will be provided by a bank that partners with the Committee and houses all student sports levies and details from the over 180 Universities, 420 Polytechnics and hundreds of Colleges of Technology, hundreds of Colleges of Education, tens of thousands of Secondary schools, and so on. Every institution readily bought into the grand scheme. Funding was going to be simple and easy.
Beyond marketing, sponsorships and partnerships, every student in tertiary institutions would pay an annual sports levy as they have paid to date.
In secondary schools, levies used to exist until they were cancelled as a result of abuse by school heads. With proper legislation they were to be revived and better monitored.
I leave everyone to work out the Math of what those levies would amount to when domiciled in a partnering bank.
Let me tell you.
I approached only one bank with the proposal. The MD of one of the biggest banks in Nigeria today, listened to me in rapt attention until I finished my presentation.
His response remains etched in my mind till this day.
He told me that every day of his life as MD he received tons of proposals from organizations and people, big and small. 90 % of them, he said, ended up in his dustbin. A small percentage attracted his attention and he sent those ones to responsible subordinates for consideration. But there were a few that attracted his full attention.
Whenever he encountered one of those ones, he knew instantly. The proposal I brought to him was one of the best he had ever received. It was a winner. His bank would partner with NASCOM to actualise it. And to demonstrate the bank’s seriousness and commitment, he invited one of his directors to join us, and instructed him to process and deliver one of the new cars the bank was using for promotions to the secretariat of NASCOM in Abuja for the project!
Within a few days, a committee of the bank had begun work. The bank’s IT department created designs for the cards that were to serve as national student ID cards, Insurance cards to cover accidents and injuries during sports events, basic ATM cards, registers every sports person within the project from secondary to any tertiary institution as a part of a welfare scheme that sustains through their sports careers and beyond!
It was a project that was too good to be true, cruising along until close to the London Olympic Games in 2012. A new minister for Youth and Sports was appointed. By the time he was returning from the Olympics, he had his own ideas and projects. Unimpressed with NASCOM, one of his first moves was to change the leadership and to install his choice of members. The body died a natural death!
In one moment of ‘ignorance’ with the stroke of a pen, he aborted a heavily ‘pregnant’ project, one of the most ambitious grassroots sports development programs in Nigeria sports history.
Quote: I approached only one bank MD with the proposal. The MD listened to me in rapt attention until I finished my presentation. He told me that as MD he received tons of proposals, big and small. 90 % of them ended up in his dustbin. The one I brought to him was one of the best he had ever received. It was a winner.
![[OPINION] Excitement over fresh reforms in Nigeria is unwise - Tonnie Iredia](/media/k2/items/cache/cf5bd9046180f6508bd19f383c37b2cd_M.jpg)
In the last few days, there has been ample excitement across Nigeria over a number of new public policies and decisions. Two of such developments stand out. The first is the plan announced by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to establish a Ministry for Livestock Development while the second is the judgment of the Supreme Court granting financial autonomy to the nation’s 774 Local Government Councils.
Unfortunately, so many people are as usual applauding the reforms on their face value. But this column is convinced that the excitement over either of the two decisions is premature because the full implications that will follow the implementation of the reforms have not been fully assessed. In particular, it is patently naïve to imagine that the pronouncement of the Apex Court will automatically cure all the ills in Nigeria’s 3rd tier of government.
The first sign that the judgment may have produced pyrrhic victory for local government officials and in fact the entire nation is the fact even governors that many thought the decision did not favour are also rejoicing and indeed explaining that they are greatly relieved from the heavy burden of managing local governments. What traps are embedded in the unexpected reaction of governors to what some people see as a judicial landmark decision? Are we really sure that leaving local councils to manage their funds will solve the problem of poor development in Nigeria’s rural areas? If care is not taken, the decision which appears positive may inadvertently create a new set of emperors in the local areas with long convoys of vehicles heralding the arrival of chairmen to events as well as creating a blanket security vote for areas where insecurity would remain the order of the day.
We hear that what initially necessitated the collaboration of states and local governments was the inability of the latter to meet certain huge costs especially the payment of teachers’ salaries. State governments thus reportedly agreed to also make some funds available to local governments which were then paid into an account to be jointly managed by both bodies. Unfortunately, the bigger partner took advantage to determine every expenditure leading to penury of local councils. So, could it be that governors would now stop aiding local councils which now have financial autonomy? Of course, we can trust politicians as they would have since after the judgment designed strategies to make those who support local autonomy to think twice.
Interestingly, those who are rejoicing before understanding where we are heading to are even asking the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC to immediately take over the conduct of local elections from State Independent Electoral Commission SIEC. About a month ago, this column had argued that INEC was not well positioned to perform better than SIEC because both organizations suffer from the same ailment which is lack of independence. We don’t expect anyone to listen to us until the ruling party at the centre starts to ‘sweep’ local council polls in states where they have no governors. It is at that point that agitators for INEC to conduct local elections will understand what politicians mean when they talk of federal power in the states.
For us, asking INEC to conduct local elections means that we are taking political autonomy away from the local councils that have just been financially empowered. Why are we now seeking to federalise a local function instead of positioning our societal institutions into embracing best practices in the conduct of elections? Whether INEC or SIEC, Nigeria is overdue for e-voting. It is time to hold seamless elections, keep to the proposed guidelines and use appropriate technologies that nullify electoral malpractices. Those who insist that we are not ripe for e-voting are yet to tell us why we are ripe for e-banking, e-passport, e-NIN etc. They must also explain why poor elections must remain our culture.
A second policy that was well received during the week was the plan by government to establish a Ministry for Livestock Development. If Nigeria must aggressively tackle hunger and hardship, no one can argue against the imperative of the plan especially now that our nation is facing imminent food crisis. Only last week, former Senate President Ahmad Lawan observed that the cost of food items in Nigeria had increased by more than 300%, warning that ‘protest will occur if all arms of govt don’t collaborate to reduce food prices and electricity tariffs. ’Tinubu’s livestock development initiative is thus in order as it will reportedly help government to focus on improving the protein intake of our people. It is also expected to generate revenue for government.
However, this second leg of the argument on enterprise and profit seems to suggest that the vehicle for achieving the noble objective is not through the instrumentality of a ministry which functions essentially as a bureaucracy. We need not look beyond Nigeria to get copious examples of how government businesses have never worked in the country. Once the ministry is created, a new Minister will assume duties with a handful of personal and special assistants who render the staff of the ministry idle. The latter are in turn forced to serve as saboteurs to the attainment of the goals of the Ministry.
Considering that it is an acclaimed fact that an inherent feature of bureaucracy is undue delays in project implementation, a country in a hurry to solve food crisis has no business bringing a ministry into it. In other words, Ministries cannot be used as reform agents for speedy execution of policies. It appears better to let them perform administrative functions while relying on technical ad hoc bodies such as the Presidential Food System Coordination Unit PFSCU which has governors, ministers and representatives of development partners and which was recently inaugurated to face urgent tasks.
Even at that, it is difficult to see how the assurances given by Vice President Shettima that the presence of bodies like the PFSCU will not usurp the functions of the existing Ministry of Agriculture. According to official records, the Ministry’s core mandate is to ensure food security in crop, livestock and fisheries, stimulate agricultural employment and services and promote the production and supply of raw materials to agro-allied industries. For this reason, the ministry has a multiplicity of ministerial departments and agencies. Among them are the Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation NAIC and three extension services – two in Zaria and one in Ibadan.
It is unfortunate that Nigeria continues to put too many cooks in a kitchen to prepare same meal. At a point, the need to set up a panel such as the famous Stephen Oronsaye panel to streamline them becomes obvious. We have been studying the Oronsaye report for more than a decade while continuing to create new bodies like the proposed Ministry of Livestock Development. The other day, a legislator was applauded for proposing a bill to establish the Federal University of Technology in Lagos. Whereas most Nigerians expect the House of Representatives to make an affirmative law for 74 of its existing 360 seats to be reserved for women, our legislators are trying to increase the numerical strength of an already money-guzzling and unwieldy House by as many as 74 extra seats for women.
Our leaders should put some halt to all these grandiose policies and attempt to tackle a few self-made basic issues. For example, one direct challenge to livestock production is incessant herder-farmer clashes. During the Buhari administration, Nigerians were required to surrender their arms and ammunitions. Some did, while others didn’t. Those who did not are seen publicly in possession of their guns. If such guns are withdrawn conscientiously by government, perhaps the deaths and the motivation for violent clashes may also reduce without establishing any new ministry.
Again, the problem of food scarcity is that of affordability and not availability. This is because the prices of food items are too high. One simple method of bringing down prices is to stop different government operatives in uniform on the highways from collecting tolls from farmers who are transporting their produce from the hinterland to urban markets. Monies collected from such transporters are usually added by them to their production costs which further increase food prices. Many years ago, Audu Ogbeh, one time Minister of Agriculture raised an alarm on it, yet till date, such illegal activity bypublic officials in uniform on self-assigned security patrols is still in vogue. Why?
![[OPINION] Rethinking Democracy in Africa - Godfrey Onah & Matthew Kukah](/media/k2/items/cache/6c3dd560258a6edbaf1201d6f8027ef3_M.jpg)
Like men in a stupor, African leaders are staggering through the labyrinthine paths of democracy, oscillating between hope and despair, chasing the promises of democracy that are now at best, a will-o-the-wisp. To imagine where we are now is to forget where we have come from. Talking about democracy in Africa right now is fatuous, akin to a man laying a foundation and inviting the village to come and admire his beautiful house. Africans feel thoroughly distraught and wonder which gods they have offended. The elite stare sheepishly at how the dreams of yesterday have turned into nightmares. They sneer at their foibles and complicity yet, while deriding their conditions and engaged in self-flagellation, they expect some kind of a deus ex machina. Like a child who has blotted his copy book, the Nigerian elite search for alibis and engage in weaving conspiracy theories and sing lachrymal tunes as to how the texture of democracy is foreign to African culture. We continue to side step the difficult but inevitable questions, namely, why is democracy not delivering for Africa?
Could we truly say that after independence we were on the democratic path while building a country on the rump of feudal states foisted on us by a hurriedly departing colonial state when both systems along with the military were antithesis of democracy? Human history is about human beings attempting over time to work out systems that would permit them to live together in peace and harmony as much as possible and for as long as possible. Some of these systems have been very simple, others less so. Yet, in all of this, each group tried to work out its own system of government, based on its own cultural, geographical, social and historical realities, and borrowing what it found useful in the experiments of other groups.
The Nigerian political elite has never really seriously committed itself to understanding the intricate dynamic fabric of our different, competing and even conflicting political and socio-cultural world views. We have had assumptions about the models of liberal democracy, rule of law and other prescriptions of what constitutes democratic culture. Before and after independence, we have had series of Constitutional reviews, constantly searching for workable models to take our people out of the state of nature where life has remained, nasty, brutish and short.
Nigeria, nay, Africa, was victim to some of the most barbaric exploitation by Arab invaders and European slave traders. These inhuman experiences threw Africans into a furnace and left behind our perpetual fault lines of violence that have rendered Africa a continent permanently on the burner of violence. Our identity violence continues to mount, wars over arbitrary boundaries persist. Ironically, the most richly endowed countries and communities today remain the most combustible environments, riddled with violence, poverty and squalor.
Against this backdrop, Africans continue to wonder, why has democracy delivered so little to us? The former colonial masters sit smugly on iron horses of racial arrogance and wonder why Africans have been unable to fix their problem after independence. Our local elite have memorized some of these lyrics and engage in self-abnegation, often believing that indeed, something must be wrong with us as a people. This ahistorical view of the world is perhaps our undoing. Africa’s unwillingness to take a historical view of where we have come from, to interrogate the assumptions of the models we have adopted have led to a level of cynicism and self-defeatism. To be sure, our purpose in this piece is to argue that there is need to rethink our assumptions about Democracy and its redeeming futures. The idea is not to negate the fine principles of Democracy, but to ask that we become more modest in our expectations of the deliverables of democracy as a system of governance.
Although we seem to have been sold to the idea that democracy is desirable for Africa, we want to interrogate this position and argue that democracy is riddled with contradictions and distortions. We will argue that the assumptions that it is the weapon of choice for delivering on good governance is an illusion. In our view, words hardly correspond exactly to the concepts which they are meant to express. Secondly, concepts and the terms that express them have different histories, and it often happens that with the passage of time a term comes to be applied to a concept with which it originally had nothing to do. We Africans have always tended to take democracy and its claims as a given, a kind of sacred text with unquestionable cannons. In doing this, we fall into the temptation of ignoring the historical, cultural phenomena that have signposted democracy through the centuries.
Modern Western democracy has various sources some of which go back to the ancient times. Most prominent among these were the classical Greek city-states (especially Athens) and the republican tradition of Rome. Equally important was the teaching of the Christian Gospel on the equality and freedom of all human beings as children of God redeemed by Jesus Christ. Medieval Italy also had model city-states while in some other parts of Europe, like in England and Sweden, vast monarchies and aristocracies introduced the practice of representation which was later to become a permanent feature of democracy. The writings of philosophers like John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and many more provided the theoretical basis for some of the important elements in the system. The American and the French Revolutions emboldened the common people and were praised by some philosophers. These philosophers imagined a world that could improve human security and happiness. The American founding fathers drew inspiration of the value of the individual and his freedom from John Locke. He provided the anchor for the theory of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
We argue therefore that the growth of democracy in Europe was the result of the inspiration of these philosophers. The development of their thoughts helped us to understand that quest for a better life is the precondition for the development of Democracy. Thus, some of the prerequisites include but are not limited to; high literacy rate and higher education for more persons, a large and influential commercial or industrial middle class, dispersion of political and economic resources among the population, higher living standards for more persons, consciousness of basic human rights founded on the dignity and equality of all the citizens, a virile and stable civil society, some form of cultural homogeneity or at least non-segmented cultural heterogeneity, and the rule of law, are regarded as prerequisites for democracy in a modern state. Facing the mirror, how do African democracies measure on these scales?
Thus, rather than seeing democracy as an end, a terminal point we can reach, we should see it as a goal, a destination, a shifting kaleidoscope with enough elasticity to accommodate the dreams of different generations. Yes, there are civilizational and economic thresholds that could make us claim that some democracies have reached some irreversible points, but as we can see from the rise of illiberalism and nationalisms elsewhere, there is no firm mast on which we can nail our colours with confidence. Thus, our notions and assumptions about democracy often produce incoherence and dissonance in practice. For example, democracies claim that they govern on behalf of the people. However, the world over, and indeed since the beginning of time, these democratic governments have often been against the people. The possibility of new elections is often presented as a proof that democracy works, but in essence, these cyclical rituals enable citizens to merely replace one set of clowns and liars with another. Often the differences are marked by a change of the jerseys among the thieving elites but not in the measurable conditions of a majority of the people.
In democracies, the political party has been recognised as an association that offers candidates platforms for competition and takes care of the interest of groups of citizens. In reality, though, political parties are elitist clubs that pursue only the interests of those who provide the huge finances needed to run them. Parties are usually hijacked by their powerful financers, usually financiers and entrepreneurs who see the entire nation and even the whole world as business firms or markets. Since modern democracies are run by political parties and political parties are run by the rich, modern democracies are, in effect, plutocracies. The persons who actually direct the affairs of state are often not overtly politicians. They are often called, cabals, mafia or godfathers who use the politicians as their puppets. The politicians give their patrons tax exemptions, the law makers ensure that the laws favour private business. These elites keep a tight leash on the bureaucracy and agencies of government. These private sector actors often claim that; government has no business in business, but in reality, they believe that; business has business in politics!
It is necessary to remember that when a name is given to thing, it often becomes a label which circumscribes the thing, removing from it the dynamism and the possibility for change which it would otherwise have had. Besides, a thing may become so appealing that its name gets to be applied lightly to other things in an attempt to confer on them the same appeal, at least nominally. In the end, the name ends up indicating so many things that it indicates nothing at all in particular. This is our dilemma with democracy today.
We therefore maintain that the democratic spirit is indispensable for their survival as nations. Some of the fruits of this democratic spirit and ethos are care, brotherhood/sisterhood, kindness, generosity, care for the weak, the stranger and the environment, among many others. In our view, the issue of governance in Africa, as elsewhere, cannot be reduced only to the question about who should govern. In the end, even when the best govern, but do not govern well, or when the people rule, but do not rule well, the problem of responsible governance in Africa will not have been solved. Governance must give us our humanity.
Finally, we agree with Aristotle who said: “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions.”
• Onah and Kukah are the Catholic Bishops of Nsukka and Sokoto Dioceses
![[OPINION] Three Takeaways from the UK Election - Simon Kolawole](/media/k2/items/cache/30c151a8d02b6cb83be468777910cbf5_S.jpg)
Many Nigerians just love the parliamentary system of government without knowing it. That was my first take-away from the UK general election, which saw the Labour Party chase the Tories out of No 10 in one of the most comprehensive defeats in the country’s history. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, assumed power and named his cabinet less than 24 hours after his party won 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, leaving the Conservative Party with 121. For context, the Tories had 365 seats and Labour had 200 before the election. While Labour gained 211 seats to claim the majority (meaning they can pass several bills on their own), the Tories lost 251. Massive.
After Starmer swiftly named his cabinet and met with his team a day following his appointment as prime minister by King Charles III, my WhatsApp started brimming with broadcasts comparing Nigeria with the UK. One reads: “The elections were held 2 days ago. Yesterday, the new Prime Minister has assumed office. The new cabinet is already in place. No transition committee.” There you go. In a parliamentary system of government, there is a governing party and an opposition party. The governing party is usually the one with the most seats in parliament, even if it takes a coalition to get the majority. The opposition party is usually the one with the second highest number of seats.
For the benefit of those who may not know how it works, the opposition party always forms a “shadow” cabinet when a new parliament is in place. For every cabinet position filled by the governing party, the opposition has an equivalent. They shadow the ministers of the governing party and have access to official documents. This enables them to make meaningful contributions to parliamentary debates, provide their own views and propose alternative policies. In a parliamentary system, the executive and legislative arms of government are merged, so most ministers/secretaries are members of parliament. There is no separation of powers. It is only the judiciary that is apart.
Therefore, naming a cabinet “within two days of winning an election” is not a big deal in a parliamentary system. As I have explained, the cabinet positions are shared before elections, with minor adjustments made where considered necessary. If a party does not win enough seats to form government and has to go into a coalition with another party, there could be a delay in naming the cabinet because of the horse trading. By the time a new parliament is proclaimed, however, the cabinet will be named. It would have been an anomaly if Starmer did not name his cabinet immediately. Rishi Sunak, as the new opposition leader, has already appointed a shadow cabinet.
In a presidential system, the type Nigeria practises, the executive is separate from the legislature. The president cannot form a cabinet until he has sent the list of nominees to the senate for confirmation hearing. He can only nominate. As an independent arm of government, the legislature can decide when it wants to conduct the hearing and decide the nominees to accept or reject. It cannot be hurried up to screen the nominees or forced to confirm them. I am not trying to justify the long delays in Nigeria — there was a time it took almost six months before ministers were appointed and this is totally unacceptable — but the president cannot realistically form a cabinet “within two days”.
Nevertheless, our presidents can do better. If there is a sense of urgency to set the ball rolling and there is some regard for Nigerians, nominees can be swiftly named and confirmed. But everything is complicated in our dearly beloved country. One, security screening takes ages. Two, names are dropped and chopped per minute. Three, the senate will still be trying to sort out its own leadership issues (National Assembly is usually inaugurated two weeks after the president). The senate will also need to schedule dates for the battalion of nominees. Give or take, we can get ministers confirmed within a month of the president’s inauguration — that is if we are really a bunch of serious people.
On the issue of transition committee, I don’t see it as a big problem. In the parliamentary system, there is hardly a need for a committee: the shadow cabinet was basically in the know of everything that happened in the previous government. The rest will be covered by the bureaucracy, which is very strong and independent. In the US, from where Nigeria copied its presidential system, there is a Presidential Transition Act that guides the peaceful and orderly transfer of power from one president to the other. There is a budget approved by the Congress for that. There is usually a transition team. Therefore, that “there was no transition committee” after the UK election is not anything novel.
By and large, though, I can see that many Nigerians love parliamentarism from the way we talk and behave. Our lawmakers pass “vote of confidence” on governors or presidents, whereas there is no such thing in our system. That is a parliamentary practice. When Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, then of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), was governor of Lagos state, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) formed a shadow government. It doesn’t work like that. (By the way, I also love and prefer the parliamentary system for many reasons, but I do not believe it will change our fortune. I stand by my pet theory that nations are developed by competent and patriotic leadership, not political systems.)
My fascination with the parliamentary system, as I have explained in the past, is mainly because of the competitive engagements in parliament. Policies are debated and dissected. The prime minister has to be accountable. Opposition has to be on top of its game. I love the prime minister question time, where probing and unflattering questions are thrown from the floor of the chamber. The prime minister has no hiding place. The parliamentary system also saves costs — you only need to win your constituency to be a member of parliament. You don’t have to print posters and campaign nationwide. In addition, most cabinet ministers are parliamentarians and cannot earn two salaries.
My second take-away from the UK election is that when voters are tired of the party in power, there is no amount of rhetoric or reasoning that will dissuade them from voting for a new party. The UK is a Conservative country and the Tories own it, just as Bayern Munich owns the German Bundesliga and Real Madrid the Champions League. But once in a while, voters get tired of the governing party and want to try something else. Sunak was the unfortunate victim. Apart from being a decent guy, he had also steadied the ship as prime minister after the shenanigans of Boris Johnson and the aftermath. The economy was recovering very well, but the British voters just wanted a change.
The amazing thing is that Starmer did not offer anything extraordinary. In fact, most of his campaign promises were lacking in detail. He refused to make specific commitments on tax rises and how he would curb immigration. Yet, the pendulum continued to swing his way before the election, forcing Sunak to shift from campaigning for the Conservatives to retain power to warning the voters against giving Labour an absolute majority. There was nothing he could say and there was nothing he could do to sway the voters. The Tories had been in power since 2010. Voters wanted a fresh breath. It did not matter if the Labour offered nothing better, but voters wanted change for the sake of change.
This is a democratic phenomenon. In the US, voters alternate between the Republicans and the Democrats. In fact, it is a usual feature, unlike in the UK where a Labour victory is once in a blue moon. It happened in Nigeria in 2015 too. The PDP had been in power from 1999 and many Nigerians were genuinely tired of them. Some politicians pulled off their PDP jerseys and teamed up with the newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC) to campaign for “change” and President Goodluck Jonathan became the first incumbent to be defeated. All his efforts to say APC had nothing better to offer failed. When the voters are tired of you, no rhetoric or reasoning can change them.
My third take-away: Fellow Nigerians, it is all politics. That is actually the title of my debut book. In it, I argue that Nigerian politicians are geniuses at playing politics, scheming and strategising, manipulating and manoeuvring, and plotting and politicking non-stop just to score a political goal. Thereafter, they forget the core purpose of politics and power: which is to promote the greater good of the society. Politicians must politick. I saw plenty of this at play in the UK. But I must quickly add a caveat: many British politicians offer genuine service to the society, and the system is robust enough to put them in check if they step out of line. Nevertheless, the political grandstanding was visible.
To send Labour packing from No 10 in 2010, the Conservatives played up the politics of high immigration figures and poor funding of public health. Some 14 years later, Labour played up the same politics of high immigration figures and poor funding of public health to get the Conservatives out. Expect the Conservatives, as opposition, to deploy these same sentiments in discrediting the Labour government in the years ahead. It is all politics. In 2015, APC overpowered PDP by playing up the raging issues of corruption and insecurity. Since then, PDP has also been playing up the same issues in trying to dislodge APC from Aso Rock. That is the nature of politics. We saw it in the UK too.
AND FOUR OTHER THINGS…
LG AUTONOMY
The Supreme Court has made a landmark ruling on the autonomy of LGAs, notably declaring that council elections must be conducted to end the epidemic of undemocratic caretaker committees. But the justices audaciously amended the 1999 Constitution by overriding Section 162(6) which states that “each state shall maintain a specific account to be called State-Joint Local Government Account into which shall be paid all allocations to the local government councils of the state from the Federation Account and from government of the state”. The provision is so clear and unambiguous. The court has now assumed the power of unilaterally amending the constitution. Disturbing.
ADAMAWA SALVO
In what seems to be a response to the Supreme Court ruling on council autonomy — a case initiated by the attorney-general of the federation — the Adamawa state government is seeking to stop the federal government from making any deductions, except permitted by law, from the federation account before allocations are shared. In simple English, this is intended to stop the federal government from deducting petrol subsidy expenses and the cost of collection by federal agencies, such as Customs and FIRS, before the federally collected revenues are distributed. I understand more constitutional cases are loading as the governors prepare to take their pound of flesh. Thriller.
AIRPORT SUBSIDY
There may be 22 airports in Nigeria but only three are profitable, according to the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN). The rest are money guzzlers. Ms Olubunmi Kuku, FAAN’s managing director, said the agency is cross-subsidising 19 airports. “We also have about six or seven airports that are either owned by state governments or private individuals or entities which we also support with either aviation security or fire and rescue services,” she said. Nigeria is now doing airport subsidy. The sad part is that many airports were built not out of economic need but because some governors wanted to be taking chartered flights because of the bad roads and insecurity. Nigeria!
NO COMMENT
The opposition to the Samoa Agreement because of the supposed LGBTQ+ content has brought out the selective righteousness in us. There was a question I asked in 2013 when we passed the anti-gay law and I am going to ask it again: when are we going to have an anti-adultery law? From the way we talk, it seems homosexuality is the only thing this our God hates. Many of those “righteously” opposed to the demonised Samoa Agreement have no problems with pornography, fornication, adultery, sex orgies with those tiny university girls, padding budgets, looting the treasury, and sniffing white powder. It seems to me that LGBTQ+ is the only thing this our God does not like. Wonderful.
![[OPINION] Correcting Dr. Olisa Agbakoba’s Assertions - Kingsley Ariamaodo](/media/k2/items/cache/45226abf705633b93bab86f0f90f16cc_S.jpg)
Eminent lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Dr. Olisa Agbakoba, has lately been calling for the repeal of the Petroleum Industry Act 2021 which is within his rights as a citizen. But in doing so, he has been making some assertions regarding the status and operations of the NNPC Ltd that are not quite true.
This is not an attempt to join issues with him. It is just to set the records straight, knowing that when falsehood is left unchallenged, it is accepted as the truth.
One of the key reasons he claims to be calling for the repeal of the PIA is that under it, NNPC Ltd is playing the roles of an operator and a regulator. When pressed to be specific on the regulatory roles being performed by the NNPC Ltd, he listed “fixing prices of petroleum products” and “acting as sole importer of petroleum products”.
The truth, however, is that the PIA does not have any provision that makes NNPC Ltd a regulator in the oil and gas industry. The PIA specifically provides for the establishment of two regulators in the industry. They are: The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), and the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA).
One of the objectives of the reforms that the PIA was designed to bring about was the scrapping of the dual roles of operator and regulator played by the NNPC as a government Corporation. Since the PIA came into force in 2021 and the consequent transition of NNPC into a limited liability company that operates under the Companies and Allied Matters Act in 2022, the Company has ceased to take on any regulatory role in strict compliance with the law.
Contrary to the learned Senior Advocate’s claim that NNPC Ltd fixes prices of petroleum products, the Company does not fix prices. In fact, no agency or entity unilaterally fixes prices of petroleum product as the PIA in Sections 205, 206 and 207 provides for a deregulated market which is currently in operation in the Downstream Sector. Under the deregulated market, every marketer is allowed to determine the price of its products as it deems fit, taking market forces into consideration. Based on this principle, NNPC Ltd through its Downstream subsidiary, NNPC Retail Ltd, fixes the prices of its products. It does not fix prices for the entire market as other marketers are at liberty to set their own prices based on market realities. This is the reason NNPC Retail stations in Abuja sell Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) at N617 per litre while other marketers sell at various prices. Similar conditions prevail across the country with different marketers selling petroleum products at different prices. If the sector was still regulated, it would be the duty of the NMDPRA to fix prices and not NNPC Ltd as a player in the industry.
On the claim that NNPC Ltd is the sole importer of petroleum products, this is also not true. Other marketers import AGO and ATK (diesel and aviation fuel). The reason they are not able to engage in the importation of PMS has to do with foreign exchange issues. But the PIA, apparently envisaging situations like this, provides that NNPC Ltd should serve as a supplier of last resort to guarantee energy security. This is very explicit in Section 64 of the PIA. That is the reason NNPC Ltd is currently the sole importer of PMS (not all petroleum products), and that does not in any way make it a regulator.
NNPC Ltd has since moved on to assume its statutory role as a commercial operator in the entire value chain of the energy industry. It has further sealed its status as a commercial operator with declaration of ₦2.52 trillion and ₦674 billion profit after tax in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
We believe that even if other members of the public, out of ignorance, still see NNPC Ltd as a regulator based on its previous operations pre-PIA, it should not be a learned silk like Dr. Agbakoba who should be familiar with the law.
Mr. Ariamaodo, writes in from Abuja.
![[OPINION] Tribute to WS at 90 - Kayode Fayemi](/media/k2/items/cache/b9f4d7679d137bd91e667cab7be624a1_S.jpg)
The name Wole Soyinka aka WS evokes sundry emotions across the spectrum. Regardless of where one stands on the spectrum, we can all agree that Wole Soyinka is one of Nigeria’s most celebrated personalities, certainly Africa’s most iconic literary maestro and one of the world’s most influential citizens. Even though I know him to treat public celebrations of his birthdays with studied indifference and a hunter’s disdain, it is still almost unbelievable that WS is 90, given his frenetic pace of work and travels. And whether he likes it or not, this is one celebration he cannot stop!
For me, WS is not the unfathomable mystery that many perceive from a distance and he is not the mythological pantheon that exists in the realm of the gods in the imagination of many. He is a mentor, a role model, a father figure and a thought-leader with whom I have had the rare privilege of communing and sharing great moments of significant historic importance in my life.
My first physical encounter with Professor Wole Soyinka was in 1994 in the course of the struggle to return Nigeria to democratic order. My familiarity with WS however preceded our opportune encounter. My first interaction with him was in his prison notes, The Man Died which I first struggled to grasp in 1975. While the motif of the book was a seductive topic of interest, the inscrutably elevated language and discursive point of view of the book made it a hard nut for me to crack at such a young age. Since then, I have not only read all his other writings I have come across – particularly the autobiographical series – Ake, Isara, Ibadan: the Penkelemes Years and You Must Set Forth at Dawn, I have gobbled them with obsessive enthusiasm. His writings and public advocacy for good governance, social justice, democracy and freedom had always made him a godfather and mentor whose association I had deeply coveted.
Consequently, when the opportunity to meet Prof happily came my way through his son, Olaokun in 1994, it was a dream come true. Professor Soyinka (who was already familiar with my work as a democracy activist in the UK through the activities of the New Nigeria Forum and its journal, Nigeria Now which I edited and regularly sent to him in Nigeria), seized the opportunity of our meeting to invite me to be part of his newly established National Liberation Council of Nigeria (NALICON) as Director of Communications.
Without giving it much thought, I enthusiastically jumped at the rare opportunity to work closely with Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature. I had reasoned that his international reputation, connection and clout would greatly enhance our struggle for the return of democratic order in Nigeria. And I reasoned right! As I indicated in my memoir of the exile years, “I came close to being labelled a passionate enthusiast and defender of the Soyinka mystique, especially having shared his worldview of the Nigerian struggle as one between authoritarianism and democracy, and not purely an ideological fixation between socialism and capitalism” (Fayemi, 2005:210). Throughout his time in exile in the 1990s, I worked closely with him on numerous projects in NALICON and the United Democratic Front of Nigeria(UDFN) along with several other patriots – the most popular of which was the underground opposition radio – Radio Freedom, later Radio Kudirat.
There is no doubt that I have always shared an ecumenical ideology and kindred spirit with Kongi. His natural spur to resist oppression, instinctive spontaneity to defy authoritarianism and his impregnable commitment to civil liberty makes him a natural inspirational mentor. In both the youthful and sagely Soyinka, has been a consistent resurgence against brutality and inordinate absolutism. As he often opines, “justice is the first condition of humanity”. His resentment against state terror and abuse of power burns like the inferno of the mythical Hades.
For WS, humanity and its happiness are the tunnels through which he travels his mind in the visualisation of social problems. Anything that denies man his inalienable rights, is for Soyinka, an abhorrent act that must be condemned in the strongest terms. He is predictably obdurate and conscientiously unapologetic for his repetitive fidelity to the triumph of human freedom, primacy of his liberty and elevation of his essence as the sole creed that all gods must serve.
His temperament rejects every iota of practices that suborn human happiness. Even in his old age, he continues to prick the conscience of the nation with penetrating homilies that poke a revelatory finger in the nose of public decadence. WS is that bitter remedy that purges a poisoned belly of its troubling constipation. His corrective words are like the surgical knife that cuts out the malignancy of a petulant lesion. He refuses to suffer fools gladly and would rather be misunderstood by people too thick to decode his angst against all governmental decadence.
He is classical in all aspects of his artistry. For some and for his obscurantism, he is the African Homer; some others say he is the ultimate Aristophanes; some even think he is the rebirth of Socrates and not just for the accident of initials, WS is our own William Shakespeare and John Milton rolled into one. He is the agglutination of literary reincarnation of the best that history can recall.
Like his ancestral forebears, WS untiringly rages against the foibles of governmental chieftains and their foreboding delinquencies. He has spoken vehemently against the cowardice of intellectual ambiguity that continues to indulge venal characters in public places. For him, no space must be yielded to the debauchers who gorge the nation’s wealth and fritter its assets in the realisation of their gluttonous hedonism.
Soyinka is impatient with the loud silence that punctuates clear cases that should strike a thunder of a mass anger. For him, until the obscurity of silence gives way to visibility of voices, any unexplained figuration about the existence of Nigeria will remain an empty indoctrination that serves the hypocritical cowardice of the nation’s power barons.
Soyinka is a patriot who has used his innate talent to serve humanity at every opportunity. His radical posture has come handy in dangerous times when only persons of sterner stuff could stand. In 1967, he was imprisoned because of his audacious antagonism to the genocidal assault that the civil-war represented. Before then, he had intruded a radio station in Ibadan in 1965 to frustrate the broadcast of an electoral heist that was meant to entrench an unpopular government. The “Man” lives in Soyinka like the ageless Olumo Rock. His stout courage, broad repository and undeniable conviction radiates his writing in plays, fictions, poetry, essays and public interventions. He uses the power of words to carry out corrective surgery and as a righting atonement for the transgressed. When he chooses his object for critical scrutiny, he deploys the elegance of humour and the pettiness of satire to disrobe the social psychopaths wherever they might be.
Soyinka is spiritual but not religious, ideological but not bigoted; for, he could not submit his intellect to the whimsical machinations of another being. He acknowledges, as he found out through his teacher, Bonany Dombree, that all spirituality sprouts from the relationship between nature and man and that the quest to create a meaning for its inscrutable foundation gave expression to the concept of deity. Thus, Soyinka’s spirituality is in the primacy of humanity and the pursuit of universal egalitarianism; this, I think, is the basis upon which his ideas of the ideal is anchored. No wonder he remains a respectable voice for human advancement in the global arena.
Even though Professor Soyinka has been an “unsuccessful” politician in the narrow manner success in politics is defined in our clime, his contribution to the political development of Nigeria is undeniable and inspiring. Apart from constantly being in the trenches for the enthronement of democracy and rule of law, he has floated a political party in the past to advocate a set of political ideas that he believed could provide an alternative answer to Nigeria’s predicament. More importantly, Professor Soyinka has been one of the moral giants who continue to point the nation to the path of rectitude in politics, constitutionalism, justice, equality and good governance. His life has been a watershed and a blessing in every aspect.
I have been a beneficiary of WS’s generosity in innumerable ways for which I owe him a great deal of gratitude, not just for writing a rare Foreword to my 2005 exile memoirs, Out of the Shadows but also for his unflinching support when I chose the partisan political route. He kept a regular watch on my political journey and was quick to commend my edifying strides in office whilst also upbraiding me whenever he found any untoward development difficult to fathom. He honoured me with the commissioning of the iconic Ekiti Government House in 2014.
At 90, WS reminds me of those unforgettable lines in Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses:
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
On behalf of myself and my wife – Bisi who adores him, here is wishing our timeless Nobel Laureate, an esteemed mentor and a humanist extraordinaire, a happy 90th birthday. Long live, Eniogun!
Dr. Kayode Fayemi, CON
Visiting Professor,
School of Global Affairs,
King’s College, London
![[OPINION] Wole Soyinka @90: A Personal Reflection - Kingsley Moghalu](/media/k2/items/cache/0ff348c64749f5c888436143ff1868ef_S.jpg)
“Wole Soyinka would like to have lunch with you”, the book publisher Bankole Olayebi, CEO of Bookcraft Africa Ltd, told me one bright day in Lagos sometime in 2018. I was startled. “Really, why?” I replied. “He read your book, BIG”, Bankole replied. “He liked it, and I think he would like to discuss the ideas you expressed in it and get to know you more”. BIG, for the uninitiated, is the acronym for Build, Innovate and Grow, my fourth book that was published in February 2018 and in which I set out a bold vision for Nigeria and how to actualize it. I had offered that vision to my compatriots as I launched an intrepid, “Third Force” bid for the Office of the President of Nigeria ahead of the 2019 general elections. That seems like such a distant memory now!
I certainly was honored to receive an open invitation from a literary giaint whose work I had first encountered in the poem “Telephone Conversation” as a teenager in secondary school. The Recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature and the first African to win the prize, Wole Soyinka CFR is both prodigy and enigma. I remembered how the world watched – millions of us in Nigeria glued to the screens of good old Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) – the grand ceremony in far-away Oslo, Norway as Soyinka received the prize, with our country represented by a high-level delegation from the very military government with which he was so frequently at odds.
Primarily a playwright and dramatist, WS is the versatile author of more than 60 books of prose (the novel), drama, poetry, essays, satire, and memoir. From The Swamp Dwellers to The Trials of Brother Jero, from Madmen and Specialists and Kongi’s Harvest to Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, from Ake: The Years of Childhood to his latest major work, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, the great writer has impacted generations of readers around the world in multiple literary genres. While his works have addressed various subjects, geographies and cultures, his plays in particular have often been an exploration of his native Yoruba culture and mythology, in the same way his great contemporary, Chinua Achebe, depicted the Igbo culture to the world via the novel, most notably in his trilogy Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease.
The memoir Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, set between 1946-1965, is my all-time favorite among Soyinka’s literary works, and he was pleasantly surprised when I told him so. In the foreword, WS describes the book as “faction, that much abused genre which attempts to fictionalize facts and events, the proportion of fact to fiction being totally at the discretion of the author”.
Soyinka is perhaps unique in his combination of a long, distinguished literary career with an equally tumultuous one as a political activist. His literature and his political dissidence cannot, in fact, be separated. The former was his prime vehicle for the latter. The idea that justice is the ultimate value in human existence lies at Soyinka’s core.
Back to that lunch – the first of many other lunches and dinners to come. We met at one of his favorite Chinese restaurants in Lagos. I was accompanied by a couple of associates. He, by Bankole. It was a pleasant and not particularly political affair. We discussed Nigeria broadly, but more pointedly the specific solutions I had proffered in BIG to our national problems – the economy, nationhood, security, foreign policy, the brain drain, etc. He was especially impressed, he said, with my proposals for how a constitutional redesign of Nigeria, popularly termed “restructuring” in our polity, could improve Nigeria’s frayed nationhood, stability, and inclusive prosperity.
As the electoral cycle progressed, we met another couple of times I think, and more frequently after the elections, and grew to be friends. He would arrive at our lunch and dinner meetings with his own preferred bottle of wine, which would promptly be buried in an ice bucket for him by attentive, awe-struck restaurant waiters. He would then instruct them: “get some water or tea for this boring fellow”, pointing to teetotalling me with mock disgust on his face!.
Soyinka cares deeply about Nigeria. He has done some very controversial things in his political-activist career, and paid the price of imprisonment, near-death at the hands of military dictators, and exile. In the 1960s, as the Nigerian political crisis degenerated, he condemned the military coups of 1966, the killings of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and the Northern Region Premier, Ahmadu Bello, and the pogrom of tens of thousands of Igbos in Northern Nigeria. After Col. Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, then Military Governor of the Eastern Region, announced the region’s seccession as the Republic of Biafra, Soyinka visited the region in an effort to broker peace. For his pains, and for speaking up against the plight of the Igbo, the Nigerian authorities imprisoned Soyinka without charges in solitary confinement for two years. His famous memoir, The Man Died, was written during his time in jail.
A couple of weeks to the 2019 elections, WS and the Citizens Forum, a civic group he convened, announced their formal endorsement of my presidential candidacy in a well reasoned public statement. Soyinka’s endorsement created a loud buzz at home and around the world, and surprised many observers. “Soyinka Stuns Bookmakers, Endorses YPP Candidate, Moghalu, for President ”, Thisday’s front-page banner headline screamed. “Wole Soyinka Endorses Moghalu for President”, reported The Guardian in its headline. The endorsement was not necessarily going to decide the election, given the uniqueness of Nigeria’s political terrain. But, coming from him, it was historically and symbolically powerful, supporting as it did a candidate outside of the two main political parties.
One has since turned one’s back on partisan politics and electoral ambitions, whether of the local government councilman or presidential variety – not just because I did not win in what was essentially at the time a trial balloon, but rather because my brief foray into Nigerian politics opened my eyes to just how soullessly rigged our system is, especially with an umpire institution that has made a mockery of the word “democracy” and turned “vote” and “count” into an oppositional relationship. But I will always consider the Nobel Laureat’s endorsement, coveted by many without success, a big win. In politics, there are many kinds of victories even beyond the polls. Changing the political narrative in our country was, for me, a source of satisfaction. .
I can also say on the record that, although my candidacy was nationalistic and not anchored on ethnic identity – which meant, in the NIgerian context, that I really wasn’t a politician in the first place because understanding root causes of national problems and how to fix them isn’t exactly the whole point – Soyinka believed that Nigeria needed to have a President of Igbo extraction, with a nation-binding vision, if our country was to truly heal from the wounds of the civil war. But he was clear that such a candidate, for him, had to have other transformational attributes other than simply a particular ethnic identity. To that extent, he was disappointed, but understood my reasons, when I withdrew from the 2023 presidential election and later announced my complete departure from the political terrain and a return to full-time professional life. He had planned to renew his endorsement of my candidacy had I been on the ballot in the 2023 elections.
Soyinka has, unfortunately in my view, been the subject of sustained attacks from some quarters recently over some of his comments about the 2023 elections. WS has taken responsibility for his comments and needs no help in standing up for or reconsidering them. My only angle of interest in the controversies is that, from what I know, emotional, knee-jerk charges of “Igbophobia” or clannishness attributed to WS by some netizens on social media (which he does not use) are thoroughly misplaced. Now, you don’t have to like the man. His greatness notwithstanding, he is a mere mortal, and not above criticism – which he himself can dish out generously and articulately when he is moved to. Nevertheless, such disagreement and criticism should be civil and not uncivil. Any charge of ethnic prejudice, in particular of an anti-Igbo hew, must necessarily collapse in the face of objective facts. First, and an obvious point – he so dislikes the part of the country that he spent two years of his life in prison standing up for their rights? That’s a non-sequitur!
Second, WS cut his teeth in political activism as a student at the University of Ibadan in the early 1950s through his support for the Dynamic Party leader Chike Obi, the renowned Professor of Mathematics and one of the towering political figures of the time. Chike Obi hailed from Onitsha in today’s Anambra State. Four decades later, as military dictatorship wound down in 1998 and a return to democracy loomed, WS led a group that, unsolicited (remember the surprising lunch invite?), quietly and discreetly attempted to broker an elite consensus that would see Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations at the time, adopted as a broad-based consensus candidate for President of Nigeria in the 1999 transition to civilian rule. A nationalist, internationalist, and revered elder statesman, Anyaoku is a proud Igbo red-cap chief, the Ichie Adazie of Obosi Kingdom in Anambra State. The military generals, however, settled on ex-General and former military Head of State Olusegun Obasanjo in order to assuage Yoruba resentment against the cancellation of the 1993 presidential election won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola, who died in detention in 1998.
At the ripe old age of 90 years in a life of renown and colossal distinction, now is not the time to nail WS to the stake. We must be a bit more forgiving of each other as Nigerians, even when we disagree. Wole Soyinka is an inspirational global icon who brought great pride to our country with his contributions to literature and the arts in the world. I am proud to call him, with humility, my friend. And so, to WS, occupied in recent years as the Arts Professor of Theatre at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), 90 cheers on his 90th birthday. With my glass of water, or fruit juice. Boring!
Kingsley Moghalu is the President of the Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation
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![[OPINION] Tinubu and the “Yoruba Emir” of Kano - Farooq A. Kperogi](/media/k2/items/cache/ad505a7088b617ac5ca2672491dff36e_XS.jpg)
The contest for royal supremacy between Muhammad Sanusi II and Aminu Ado Bayero took an explicitly ethnic turn a few days ago when Hashim Dungurawa, the Kano State chairman of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), said President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was protecting Bayero from deposition and humiliation by Kano’s NNPP government because of Bayero’s “Yoruba lineage”!
“If the President thinks he will use a few of his kinsmen in Kano and the alleged Bayero’s Yoruba lineage to continue to keep the deposed Emir Aminu Ado Bayero in the State, let him wait for 2027, we will show him that those people will not help him,” Dungurawa said.
By Dungurawa’s ethnic supremacist logic, Kano had a Yoruba emir from March 2020 to May 2024 since “lineage” means line of descent, which is traced patrilineally in most Nigerian societies, including Kano.
By the way, it was actually Muhammad Sanusi II who first covertly caused this whispering campaign to be created and amplified in 2020 in Kano in the aftermath of his deposition and the installation of Bayero as his successor. He did it to delegitimize Bayero.
Nor is this sort of atavistic ethnic baiting Sanusi’s first. For example, after former presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu characterized his Fulani supremacist, anti- Hausa (and anti-anyone who isn’t Fulani) article titled “The Fulani Factor in Nigerian Politics” as “Sanusi’s racist rubbish” in July 2000, he was so enraged that he lied in an Arewa House lecture that Garba Shehu’s parents were from Edo, as if Edo people were lesser humans.)
But what’s the basis for the astonishingly counterintuitive claim that Aminu Ado Bayero is a Yoruba man even though he is the spitting image of his later father, Ado Bayero?
Well, it’s because his mother, Hajia Maryam, who died in 2021, was the daughter of Zulkarnain “Sulu” Muhammadu Gambari, the 9th emir of Ilorin who died in 1992. In other words, she was the older sister of the current (11th) emir of Ilorin.
Although no Yoruba person regards the Ilorin ruling family as anything but Yoruba-speaking Fulani people, Sanusi and his ethnic supremacist supporters regard the family’s locational, linguistic, and possibly genetic, association with Yoruba people as a “stain” on the “purity” of their Fulani identity.
Never mind that Sanusi himself—and all emirs in the Northwest—have locational, linguistic, and genetic association with Hausa people, just like the Fulani emirs in Nupeland have locational, linguistic, and genetic association with the Nupe people. Or that ethnic cosmopolitanism is central to the originative imagination of the Dan Fodio caliphate.
The notion that Aminu Bayero is of “Yoruba lineage” because his mother was a Yoruba-speaking Ilorin Fulani princess is utter, misguided, counterproductive identitarian essentialism, that is, the pretense that there is such a thing primordial ethnic purism that is “unblemished” by interconnectedness with other identities.
The claim that Tinubu is protective of Aminu Ado Bayero (which, by the way, I resent because it has no basis in law since only governors can enthrone and dethrone traditional rulers) is particularly ironic because Ado Bayero was one of only a few traditional rulers (the other being the Sultan of Sokoto) who had the courage to tell Tinubu that his economic policies were strangulating the people.
In February this year, he told First Lady Remi Tinubu to let her husband know that ordinary people were in pain. “Although, we have several means of communicating to the government on our needs and requests, you are the surest way to tell the President the happenings in the country,” he said. “We get information daily that essential commodities and cost of living are high, and people are suffering, although it didn’t start with this government.”
How about the self-proclaimed “pure-bred” Fulani Sanusi who has encouraged his minions to play up the Yoruba ethnic “contamination” of Bayero as the reason Tinubu isn’t supporting him? Well, he is delighted with the current state of the economy and patted Tinubu on the back for removing subsidies from petrol.
“It’s injustice for anyone to blame the Tinubu administration for the current economic hardship because there is no other alternative than the removal of the fuel subsidy,” Sanusi said. “After all, Nigeria cannot even afford to pay the subsidy.”
He even went so far as to claim that the economy is in the toilet because Muhammadu Buhari resisted his counsel to “firmly and unequivocally eliminate fuel subsidies.” “The economy was poorly managed, and they [were] not willing to take advice,” he said.
A “Yoruba” emir was empathetic toward the suffering of his people and told a “fellow” Yoruba man, who is the president, the truth about the anguish his policies have caused people without fear of consequences, but an “undiluted” Fulani emir told the Yoruba president that his mass pauperization of people and the obliteration of their means of livelihood was all fine and dandy.
Yet the toadyish, sadistic “Fulani” emir who cheers while the people incinerate in infernal economic policies is causing his underlings to whisper that the truth-telling emir is being favored by the president out of a sense of ethnic solidarity.
Maybe the Sultan of Sokoto also secretly has tinctures of Yoruba (and possibly Kanuri) blood freely flowing in his veins that caused him to be defended and protected by the Tinubu presidency against a planned deposition Sokoto’s APC government for his alleged sympathies for the previous PDP government of Aminu Tambuwal.
“And to the Deputy Governor of Sokoto, I have a simple message for you: Yes, the Sultan is the Sultan of Sokoto, but he is much more than that; he represents an idea, he is an institution that all of us in this country need to jealousy guard, protect, promote, preserve and project for the growth of our nation,” Vice President Kashim Shettima said at North-West Peace and Security Summit in Katsina State on June 25.
The truth Sanusi and his defenders don’t want to confront is that he is a deeply unpopular person in Kano. He is the only past emir in living memory whose appointment as an emir sparked a violent, spontaneous mass revolt because he wasn’t on the shortlist of princes recommended for emirship by the kingmakers. Sanusi Ado Bayero, Aminu Ado Bayero’s older brother, was the choice of the kingmakers.
Most people know that one of the central pillars of support for Aminu Ado Bayero is a scion of old money in Kano who detests and resents Sanusi and who is extremely close to Tinubu. The NNPP people know this. They know that Bayero’s Ilorin maternal identity (which Tinubu and his people don’t recognize as “Yoruba”) is incidental to the issues.
They also know that Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Tinubu had struck a deal that required Kwankwaso to spare Bayero in exchange for a favorable Supreme Court judgment and a chance to serve as a minister in Tinubu’s cabinet. His betrayal of this deal by dethroning Bayero hurts Tinubu deeply.
More than this, though, the dangerous game of reactionary ethnic purism that Sanusi is playing and that his minions in the political arena are trying to instrumentalize for national political machinations would inflict incalculable injury on identity formation in the North.
The North, even the Muslim North, is an intricate tapestry of multiple ethnic identities. These identities are united by a higher, overarching glue. In the case of the Muslim North, that glue is Islam, which is causing an ethnogenesis to emerge from a mishmash of identities. To delegitimize or alienate a Kano emir because he traces maternal ancestry to the geographic fringe of the North communicates to the people from that place that they are unwanted, that they don’t belong.
It reminds me of the grave error of judgment that northern Muslim elites made during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, from which the North hasn’t recovered.
Obasanjo threw an opportunity for the North to really live up to its "one North, one people" mantra and it failed. Of all Nigeria's former regions, the North is the only region that was ruled as one and that was unbroken until the regional structure was disbanded. Suddenly, because of Obasanjo's appointments, a northerner who was a Christian was no longer a "northerner." Even a northerner who was a Muslim (such as Ibrahim Ogohi) wasn't a "northerner" unless he came from the Northwest or the Northeast.
Obasanjo was clearly smarter than northern leaders because he destroyed the myth the North cherishes about itself by testing it. Tinubu may be inadvertently doing the same thing to the emirate system. If you don’t manage your diversity well, a smart, competing outsider will always exploit it to divide and conquer you.
![[OPINION] How I quit smoking (1) - Tunde Odesola](/media/k2/items/cache/0f1d3e5a9f8bf4070e324c3b82e72a7f_XS.jpg)
Now that my father and mother are dead and have gone to where the elderly go to rest their bones in death, I can confess my cigarette addiction. Not that either could put their hands on a Bible and vow that their firstborn was a nicotine-free teetotaler, but both card-carrying Christians thought my cigarette and alcohol use was a fleeting adolescence misstep when Satan took me up to the mountain and showed me the world, and said: “Is it not written that the earth is of the Lord and the fullness thereof; eat, smoke, drink and enjoy, son.” My father and mother were certain their ceaseless fire-for-fire prayers and biri-biri fasting round the clock were responsible for my repentance before ‘iji aye’, the world’s whirlwind, could sweep me off in my early teenage years.
We had a cassava plantation in our Lagos State backyard back in the day when I was in secondary school.
One sunny afternoon, the Devil knocked on my door and I opened it. He grabbed me by my left hand and led me to the green pasture downstairs. If you ever had a cassava plantation, you would know the canopy of tranquil neatness the tall-growing slender stalks provide underneath to nourish nature.
The evil that men do to the Devil lives in their hearts. Uhm! In his irresolvable confusion, Man contemplated the whip of chastisement eternally held by the Conscience and called it the devil. Yes, the devil. Remove the definite article ‘the’ from ‘the devil’, what do you have? Devil, yes. Put a dash between ‘D’ and evil. You’ll get D-evil aka The-evil.
A global Nigerian musical star bears DBanj. The Seruabwon of Osun politics, the late Alhaji Isiaka Adeleke, was popularly called D Gov.
So, what man calls the devil is d-evil that he does. The image of a black and ugly fire-spitting creature with a long tail and a spear is a figment of the imagination.
I’m not saying there are no powers in heaven and on earth. I’m not saying there’s no God. There’s God, the Maker of heaven and the earth, and I believe in Him. I’m only saying the devil, as concocted by man, is an explanation of the force that wrestles with the truth inside the conscience. But isn’t it written that ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free?
As I was saying, the fall guy we all call the devil grabbed my hand and led me to the cassava pasture backyard. He brought out a stick of Consulate cigarette, lit and gave it to me, just like it gave Eve the apple. I took a military drag. In the cigarette smoking parlance of my time, military drag was the one-time l-o-n-g drag that burns a quarter of the cancer stick called cigarette, filling your lungs fully with smoke.
As I was enjoying the cigarette the devil gave to me and was feeling giddy, I saw my mother right from where I was seated under the canopy of cassava. She couldn’t see me unless she bent to look beneath the green mat of cassava leaves. But she had perceived the smell of burning tobacco and was gearing to know where it was coming from.
I crawled further back into the plantation and sat, my unblinking gaze watching her advancing towards the cassava farm. I quickly buried the cigarette and the lighter. I couldn’t see her face which was screened off by the cassava leaves above. I could only see her lower limbs. As she got to the edge of the farm, she bent to see below the foliage and she saw her begotten son seated like Oba Efon – the Lord of the Flies.
Mo ku, mo gbe, mo dara is the lamentation of the condemned. “Kilo n se ni be yen?” she ‘innocently’ asked to know what I was doing in the underworld. “Mo n gba ategun ni; I’m resting,” I answered in a tired voice, trying to yawn.
Then I committed a forced error. I sidestepped her and went upstairs. By the time she got upstairs, the acrid smell of cigarette had overwhelmed the household on the sunny day. “Tunde!” she called out. I was in the bathroom, washing mouth and body. “Did you bring your cigarette upstairs to rest?” she inquired, adding the death sentence, “When your father comes back from work, you will explain when you started smoking to him.”
Like Joshua, I prayed for the sun to stand still because I knew if my father came back in the evening, he would beat me like the inedible snake called ejo aije. My prayer wasn’t answered. The sun didn’t stand still, it went back home to rest while my father arrived, ate and rested before giving my brain a factory reset.
My mother made me fast for seven consecutive days, choosing more than a dozen psalms for me to read each hour of the day. I fasted and prayed but I didn’t stop smoking whenever cigarettes were available. I didn’t stop smoking because I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I wasn’t an everyday, impulsive smoker. I just smoked when my hands were idle and the devil was at his workshop.
When I got admitted into the University of Lagos in the 80s to read Chemistry, I discovered on campus that cigarettes were part of most students’ menus. I also began to smoke after each meal. Then I graduated to smoking before each meal, before sleeping, when I woke up, when going to the toilet, when stressed, when drinking, when happy; every time.
Because I never loved the esoteric nature of Chemistry, I changed my course and university the following year. I love writing and I wanted to be a journalist. To free myself from parental control, I chose the Imo State University, now Abia State University. This was where I earned the title, Eruku Jeje, which means Billowing Smoke. It was impossible to see me without a cigarette, day or night. When fellow smoking students were looking for matches or cigarettes, they knew the room to come in Hostel B.
Under my mattress, there must be matches and cigarettes. There was honour among smokers, nobody dared steal my cigarette but you’re free to use the matches of lighters anytime.
After I finished Youth Service in the Umuopu and Aji communities of Igbo-Eze North, Enugu State, I headed back home to Lagos, and continued smoking regularly; my bird had learnt how to fly without perching, escaping my parents’ stones.
I started life as a classroom teacher. Down the line, I changed jobs and became a journalist in Lagos with PUNCH newspapers. I always had perfumes, roll-ons, and air fresheners in my laptop bag, car, apartment, everywhere. Some of my friends knew I visited in their absence when they arrived at home and perceived my signature perfumes. If you smell my fingers, you won’t perceive cigarette smoke on them because I invented the use of straw as a cigarette holder. I would tie a straw to the butt of my cigarette and I’m good to smoke without leaving a telltale sign on my fingers.
If by a very rare oversight or error, there were no perfumes at hand in my car or bag, I would open my car bonnet, get to the carburettor, loosen one hose and get some fuel to wash my hands and rub some in my hair to smell like the car broke down and I was at the mechanic’s fixing it.
However, at a time in my bachelor life, I literally looked in the mirror and spoke to myself. “Tunde, you can’t continue this way. Is this the kind of life you want your children to inherit from you?” I asked myself. And I said to myself, “I never saw my father smoke. Why would I be the one to lead my children to smoking?”
I didn’t decide to quit smoking for health reasons. I didn’t care at the time about its health implications. I quit because I didn’t want to be the one my unborn children would see and take to smoking. Smoking is a dirty habit, I tell you.
Quitting smoking was the singular most arduous achievement in my life. It wasn’t going to the university or building a house or buying a car. It was smoking. Quitting was war. I would light a cigarette, puff on it and tears would well up in my eyes. I would throw it away only to repeat the same process hours or a day later.
Then I lifted my eyes unto the hill. I didn’t go before any pastor or imam. Each day, I spoke to myself and to the hearing of anyone who cared to listen, “I’ll stop smoking.” Many of my friends laughed, saying, “You? Devil dey go retirement?”
To be continued.
![[OPINION] WS@90: Heroism, myth and meta-myth - Richard Odusanya](/media/k2/items/cache/a6f5f42a9a33c79fbccf94c16d5a25b7_XS.jpg)
Nation-building requires heroes. A nation without documented heroes or comprehensive documentation of the lives and times of their heroes and heroines, will not succeed in positively impacting as many young ones as are needed to berth a great country. So, essentially, a good number of the world’s most successful countries are endowed by the nourishment and talents of their diverse population which ultimately produces heroes.
Heroes have always played a crucial role in binding societies, offering courage, sacrifice, leadership, and moral integrity narratives. Whether real or mythical, these individuals provide nations with a sense of history, identity, unity, and shared values. Here comes Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde “Wole” Soyinka (CFR), a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African to be so honored.
Every country has its fair share of a national hero or hero. The world needs more people with critical thinking skills coupled with an objective mindset capable of sequestering their internal bias when required by equally pertinent decisions that need to be made by decisive individuals with experience and practical wisdom in humble coexistence within their mindset. What most people mistake for a “hero” is usually just a victim of circumstance that devolves into an eminent personality with huge responsibilities.
Wole Soyinka (WS), is best known as a playwright, alongside his literary career, and has also worked as an actor and in theaters in Nigeria and Great Britain. His works also include poetry, novels, and essays. WS is by every intellectual and academic classification an iconic figure. His reputation blossomed after he won the Nobel Laureate in 1986 having distinguished himself as a literary genius.
WS has been a guiding force in shaping the cultural and intellectual landscape of the continent of Africa, particularly in Nigeria. Therefore, my fellow compatriots join me as we celebrate WS@90. It has become imperative that as a people we need to reflect on WS’s profound contributions and the everlasting impact of his work and advocacy – through the sacrifice and fearless commitment to social justice, unwavering defense of freedom of expression, and promotion of Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage, WS, stands as a beacon of excellence and inspiration.
Unarguably, a nationalist, eruditely broadminded, and dependable hard-working person apart from selfless adventures. Can I just mention only one remarkable example; apart from those that sadly died during the Nigerian civil war, WS, suffered more than most for the cause of Biafra. He was not only imprisoned in Kirikiri prison during the war but he was also put in solitary confinement and chained to the floor. In his words: “I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat danger and to the force of people who might despise me.”
Kongi, as you’re fondly called, Africa’s most iconic literary maestro and one of the world’s most influential citizens, quintessential poet at 90. I join millions of our compatriots across the globe to celebrate an eminent scholar, dramatist, poet, and humanist who would have preferred a quiet celebration, his associates have decided otherwise. Africa’s first Nobel Laureate, a humanist, role model, thorn in the flesh of dictators, and a of hope to humanity.
In conclusion, permit me to sign off with a call to action using the profound words of Jacob Nordby a storyteller, thinker, and adventure seeker whose many quests have led him to a deep fascination with life in all of its weird splendor. He has written the award-winning novel, The Divine Arsonist, and a non-fiction titled, Blessed Are the Weird – A Manifesto for Creatives. Jacob remarked as follows: “Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers mystics, painters, troubadours for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.”
Finally, WS, history will write your name in GOLD, as i crave the indulgence of my readers to adopt my sister’s birthday message to Kongi: “…My darling Uncle Wole, Happy 90th birthday! I am so happy that you made it to the Nonagerian level, and still have your wits around you. You are still as fit as a fiddle and your mind is so sharp, despite the hardships you have been through as a literary and Human Rights activist in Nigeria.
“I am glad that you are alive to see the results of your good works- you are being celebrated in all the continents of the world! You deserve this and more, our wordsmith, Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, from Ake to Ibadan, and Ife on to the global stage!!! With lots of love and gratitude, Funso Adegbola. For Bola and Atinuke Ige’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY WS@90, Nobel Laureate, Prof Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, who we fondly call Uncle Wole, Kongi, Prof, ‘Captain Blood’ and our WORDSMITH.
Richard Odusanya can be reached via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
![[OPINION] Analysis: Is Seplat Energy a Buy, a Hold, or a Sell? - Idika Aja](/media/k2/items/cache/2bc8cdae75cc16dfc5d81e06d80231ae_XS.jpg)
The year 2023 was fantastic for Seplat Energy, with the share price gaining 110% to reach N2,310.
The share price rally has continued in 2024. In the first month of the year, the share price gained 33.10%, closing at N3,074.60.
Nairametrics had earlier reported a growing sense of optimism regarding the sustainability of Seplat’s share price surge, projecting it could reach N3,500.
On June 27, 2024, the company’s shares experienced a remarkable surge, breaking through the N3,500 mark and reaching a new 52-week high of N3,790.90.
However, by July 11, 2024, the share price had retracted to N3,480, marking an 8.3% decline from its recent high.
Despite this drop, the company remains a formidable player on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, holding its position as the eighth most valuable stock with a market capitalization of NGN 2.05 trillion, representing about 3.64% of the total equity market.
From the foregoing, should investors buy, hold or sell this well-known oil and gas stock?
Financial Performance
Seplat Energy has shown strong financial performance, with an average annual growth rate of 12% over the past five years.
In 2023, the company achieved an impressive 72% year-over-year surge in sales, followed by a further 77% YoY growth in Q1 2024.
A significant portion (88%) of Seplat Energy’s revenue comes from crude oil sales, indicating a heavy reliance on the volatile oil market.
This dependency means that any significant drop in oil prices and the inherent volatility of the business could negatively impact Seplat’s revenue and profitability.
For instance, in 2023, the average realized oil price declined by 18% to $83.39/bbl from $101.67/bbl in 2022.
In Q1 2024, despite the 4.7% growth in average realized crude oil price to $86.17/bbl from $82.32/bbl in Q1 2023, crude oil revenue declined 49.4% to $150.8 million from $297.9 million in Q1 2023, attributed to the timing of lifting, exacerbated by the overlift reported in Q1 2023.
On the other hand, in 2023, gas sales account for only 12% of revenue, showing limited diversification.
Gas revenue fell by 12.4% to $29.0 million in Q1 2024, compared to $33.1 million in Q1 2023. The decline in gas revenue was attributed to lower gas volumes produced during the period, due principally to delays in new gas wells coming on stream; these are now expected to be operational in Q2 2024.
This is reassuring, especially with signs of potential change in this area. Commenting on the Q1 2024 unaudited financial results, Roger Brown, Chief Executive Officer, said:
“Looking further forward, we were pleased to see more progressive actions taken by President Tinubu and the industry regulators.
In March, the President signed executive orders that will provide fiscal incentives in our gas and midstream businesses.
More recently, the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) lifted the domestic gas price to $2.42/Mscf, supporting revenue generation and re-emphasizing the government’s commitment to developing Nigeria’s gas resources, a factor aligned with Pillar 2 in our strategy.”
Impact of Operational Costs on Profitability
Aside from price volatility and production volume dynamics impacting revenue, operational costs are another significant factor affecting profitability.
While reported currency figures show apparent growth due to favorable currency movements, constant currency adjustments reveal the true operational performance, providing a clearer picture of the company’s health and trends.
For instance, in Q1 2024, production operating expenses (opex) were $9.6 per barrel of oil equivalent (boe), up from $9.0 per boe in Q1 2023. Additionally, general and administrative expenses increased by 17.2%, amounting to $24.1 million compared to $20.5 million in the first three months of 2023.
As a result, gross profit fell by 78.5% to $42.7 million, down from $198.3 million recorded in Q1 2023 (a 29.9% decrease in Q1 2024 to N83.813 billion).
Operating profits also decreased by 21.0% to $81.9 million, compared to $103.7 million achieved in Q1 2023 (a 157% increase in Q1 2024 to N122.377 billion).
Despite the underlift gains, pre-tax profit declined by 19.49% to $69.288 million, down from $86.060 million in Q1 2023 (a 161.9% increase in Q1 2024 to N103.513 billion).
Looking Forward
Seplat believes that the business remains strong, with production firmly on track in 2024. In its FY 2023 results, the company outlined several growth opportunities for 2024.
- The first of these to start generating revenue for Seplat is Sibiri, which came on stream just a few weeks after the FDP approval was received from NUPRC.
- At Abiala (a marginal field within OML 40), the drilling programme is on track to start during Q2 2024.
- The resumption of operations on the Trans Niger Pipeline in April, approximately four months ahead of plan.
- Access to the pipeline will enable increased production from OML53 and provide the primary export route for condensate from AGPC, which remains on track for the first gas in Q3 2024.
Overall, it appears the company has set to mitigate and navigate through the production, revenue diversification and costs issues.
What should investors do?
Getting back to the original question of what course of action investors should take requires consideration of some important factors.
For income-oriented investors, looking at Seplat’s dividend policy/trend accompanied by share gain, makes buying and holding this stock compelling.
Seplat pays quarterly dividends, and in 2023, the company paid out a total dividend of $15 per share. At varying exchange rates, this amounted to N126.45 per share or N74.412 billion, representing a 91.42% payout and an 189% year-over-year increase.
In the current year, in line with its quarterly dividend policy, the board approved a Q1 2024 dividend of US 3.0 cents per share.
In 2022, Seplat Energy’s stock significantly outperformed the market with a Year-to-Date (YtD) return of 69.23%, compared to the NGX All-Share Index return of 19.98%.
In 2023, the stock continued its strong performance with a YtD gain of 110%, surpassing the NGX All-Share Index YtD gain of 45.90%.
As of the current year, Seplat has achieved a YtD gain of 51%, outpacing the broader market YtD gain of 33%. Currently, the stock offers a dividend yield of 4%, taking a total return to 54% year-to-date.
However, it is important to note that Seplat’s price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 59.52x is significantly higher than the industry’s average P/E ratio of 17.64.
This high P/E ratio indicates that the stock is trading at a premium compared to its peers, suggesting that the market has high expectations for Seplat’s future growth.
While this premium valuation could be justified by Seplat’s strong dividend policy and growth prospects, it also introduces a higher level of risk.
Its price to sales ratio of 1.42x affirms the market expectations for future revenue growth.
Investors need to consider whether they believe Seplat can meet these high expectations and continue to grow at a pace that justifies its current valuation.
High valuation implies that investors expect Seplat to deliver strong future growth in earnings and dividends. If Seplat fails to meet this heightened expectation; if its actual earnings growth or dividend payouts fall short of expectations, investors may react negatively, leading to a decline in the stock price.
Overall Bancorp Securities and Afrinvest, according to the NGX’s Broker stock recommendations for July 8th – 12th, 2024, both issued a “Hold” rating on SEPLAT.