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“And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet…” (Matthew 24: 6).
“And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet…” (Matthew 24: 6).
AS Nigerians are drenched in cries of agony, so is the air also thick with rumours of a coup d’état or military take-over. Those not marching on the streets and shouting “ebi n pa wa” (We are hungry!), like the multitudes that have done so across the country, are, like my brother, Azu, who, in his latest column, complained about the heat wave and the parlous state of power supply. I sleep in a room that is naturally well aerated; still, anytime the air ceases, sleep takes a flight. To divert sleep time to work becomes impossible with no power supply. Running generators in the middle of the night is simply unconscionable and without electricity to charge the batteries, the inverter cannot work. The cost of the other alternative, solar, has shot through the roof! Like another of my PUNCH-day colleagues, Godwin Nzeakah, aka Ogbuefi, would say, it does not rain for hapless Nigerians, it pours! Yet, we saw it coming but neglected to act. Crying after the head is off, bolting the stable doors after the horse has bolted and crying after the milk has been spilled is all we are doing now. Worse are my fears that we may recourse to taking rash decisions in our habitual manner of cutting corners and adopting fire brigade approaches to matters that demand painstaking fidelity with due process.
We risk going back into the thick forest of jackboot dictatorship that we exited at great pains and sacrifice; we shall be making our situation worse should we resort to another military take-over at this point in time. The military top brass has spoken out forcefully against a coup but can we take their word for it? Are they themselves not at risk should their juniors decide to upturn the apple cart? It has been said that the antidote to military coup is good governance: Can anyone say, in good conscience, that this country has witnessed good governance since the present civilian rule began in 1999? Rather than improve, things have gone from bad to worse; the worst of all the civilian governments being that of Muhammadu Buhari. The incumbent, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is stuck in the miry clay that Buhari engineered deliberately or otherwise, leading to the immense suffering that Nigerians experience today. Unfortunately, there is no easy and fast way out of the quagmire, even though the patience of Nigerians is already running thin. Agent provocateurs are cashing in on the situation mostly to serve selfish interests. A population that worships the belly and that only knows of temporary pleasure, like biblical Esau, wears their ignorance like a badge, harassing every voice of reason and ready to cudgel every contrary opinion into submission.
If democracy teaches us anything, it is that the majority is not always right. Interestingly but also ironically, the tyranny of the majority has been one of the most damning drawbacks of democracy. So, then, did the German playwright, Henrik Ibsen, posit that the strongest man is he who stands alone. Oftentimes, we need the services of a telescope to differentiate between democracy and mob action. Strong leaders, ready to stand alone and chart the course, however unpopular, have made the most profound impact on our world. Galileo, for instance, was sent to the inquisition for affirming that the Earth was spherical and not as flat as a trencher that the authorities had claimed it to be. Had Martin Luther not dared to be different, what would our world have been without the Reformation? My message to Tinubu is: Dare to be different! Listen to the people but all the same chart the course that will take Nigeria out of the dark tunnel engineered by Buhari and his cabals. Speak to us more often. Explain your actions more plainly. Be more forthright in exposing the shenanigans of the past. No cover up of Buhari or anyone for that matter! On your own part – and on the part of your family members – be more sensitive to public perception of your actions. While you need to take all the precautions that need to be taken to contain the rumours of coup, don’t allow it to clip your wings.
Despite the rash of coups around us in the West African sub-region in recent times, military take-overs have generally become an aberration. In Nigeria especially, the military not only destroyed the fabrics of our society, it also overstayed its welcome. From the first military coup that was Igbo-dominated and one-sided in the political leaders and military officers it executed; to the first military government led by another Igbo-man, Gen. JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, that destroyed our federalism and instituted centralism and military-style command structure; to Yakubu Gowon whose rash decisions (together with Chukwuemeka Ojukwu’s) led to the civil war and the subsequent fritting away of our oil wealth; to Murtala Muhammed who destroyed the Civil Service with his rash “with immediate effect” dismissals and retirements; to Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration when Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) was allowed to collapse and pronto surfaced Obasanjo Farms Nigeria (OFN); to Muhammadu Buhari whose draconian rule led to retroactive executions, the trampling of the people’s fundamental human rights and the disappearance of huge oil windfalls; to Ibrahim Babangida whose SAP began the destruction of the Naira, who introduced corruption and the settlement syndrome, and destroyed seniority and esprit de corps in the military; to the vilest of them all, Sani Abacha, who stole this country blind and who wasted MKO Abiola away in detention and, finally, to Abdulsalami Abubakar whose administration has the blood of Abiola on its hands – we have had more than enough of military rule. No more! Perish the thought of military take-over if no one wants Nigeria to perish with it!
A new government in Ni geria came on board, on May 29, 2023, that is some 9 months ago. Although the new administration headed by former Lagos governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu is sponsored by the All Progressives Congress, APC, which had earlier sponsored his predecessor, optimists believe that this time around, change is around the corner.
If it is actually on its way, it does not appear that any such movements concern the pervasive insecurity of the Buhari years. As if nothing has changed, several students and their teachers only 3 days ago faced threats of kidnapping resulting in no less than 287 missing persons in Kaduna State. The modalities of the abduction as well as official reactions to the development suggest that at least as far as the subject of insecurity is concerned, Nigeria is yet to move from where it stood before May 29, 2023.
Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State has quickly visited the scene – from where he has given the assurance that the abducted pupils would be rescued soonest. While addressing members of the affected community, the governor said, “In my capacity as your elected governor, I am assuring you that by the grace of God, all the children will return unhurt.” The stereotype statement is a very familiar one. His predecessor, Nasir El Rufai gave similar assurances 8 years earlier. President Tinubu has also promptly waded in with a directive to the security agencies to swiftly rescue the abductees including those affected in Borno State. Again, this is not new because former President Buhari spoke similarly all through his tenure. The only difference is that Tinubu is more assertive and better forthcoming with his acceptance of vicarious liability for several incidents.
If some citizens believe the relevant agencies will do as the President directed, nothing shows that insurgents are also as simplistic. Evidence that they are emboldened to remain lawless is provided from the same state – Kaduna, where in less than 48 hours after attacking and abducting about 287 students from Kuriga community, the bandits struck again killing at least two worshippers during Friday prayers.
According to one of the community leaders, Hudu Kwasakwasa, the attack took place at about 2 pm on Friday, a day after the school abductions; with the bandits opening fire indiscriminately on the worshipers. When incidents like this occur who precisely should be held accountable? This is probably the appropriate junction to ask the question that is yet to be answered in the country making it appear that no one is in charge of security anywhere in our clime.
There is also a possiblility that identified security agencies may do little or nothing about security breaches and that they would not be held accountable. Here, we recall the 2018 story of former Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, who disobeyed President Buhari’s orders to prioritise government’s response to insecurity in Benue state by personally relocating to Makurdi. It is not only that Idris did not relocate as directed, the President did not know that the Police boss disobeyed his orders. Buhari got to know only in March 2018 during his own belated visit to the state whereas the directive had been given in January, that is, 3 months earlier when gunmen invaded some Benue communities and killed 73 persons. Even when the President became aware of Idris’s non-compliance, he was surprisingly allowed to remain in office as IGP.
By the suspension of Minister Beta Edu and a few removals of some office holders for one lapse or the other, Tinubu has shown that it may not be business as usual but actions taken so far are too few to make the desired impact on the level of impunity and prevalent indiscipline which he inherited from his predecessor. In all honesty, so many things happened in the past for which no one was held accountable; a good example being the series of jail breaks in the country.
Between 2015 and when President Tinubu assumed office in 2023, there were no less than 18 prison breaks in Nigeria, with nearly 9,000 inmates released. The Kuje prison at the heart of the nation’s capital, Abuja, presented a scandalous jailbreak which followed the same pattern of attacks on security forces with the use of explosives. When Buhari visited the location and was showed round the facility, all he said via a tweet was that he was “saddened” by the attack and “disappointed” with Nigeria’s intelligence system.’
With the way the jaibreaks were handled it is easy to imagine that in future, Nigeria may not be able to develop strong correctional centres or indeed any viable societal institution . Here, the attack on an Abuja-Kaduna train service in March 2022 is instructive. According to media reports, terrorists emerged from the Kateri-Rijana forest of Kaduna State, setting off explosives to derail the train carrying 362 passengers. Shots reportedly came from all directions as the attackers surrounded the train and managed to abduct over 100 of the passengers while 8 people died. Government did nothing thereafter to allay the fears of citizens that there was no safety anywhere in Nigeria.
Instead, the nation was left to hear claims and counter claims on the subject. The then Kaduna governor El Rufai was sure the blame ought to have gone to the military for failing to attack the terrorists, despite identifying them long before the train tragedy. On his part, former transport minister, Rotimi Amaechi, said he had long warned of possible attacks on the rail line. Amaechi claimed he had requested some digital security and crime detection equipment that could forestall such terror attacks on the rail line but his requests were turned down.
If a minister got approval to spend huge sums to put the rail into use, those in the corridors of power who turned down a smaller request to technically secure the system may have to be unravelled by posterity. And that would come several decades after the lapse had led to the holding of several passengers as hostages who were released in batches following negotiations with their captors after the attack. The abductors were believed to have collected huge ransoms from the families of the abductees. This confirms that in Nigeria, the security of the people along with their welfare which our consitution says is the primary purpose of government is handled halfheartedly with no one held accountable for its unending breaches
Unfortunately, information on future developments after the initial passing of the buck has as usual been poorly managed. For example, although the military later claimed to have apprehended one of the masterminds of Abuja-Kaduna train attack, nothing substantial emerged as to who the sponsors of the attacks are or the extent to which the capture of the said mastermind could have led to getting to the root of the national embarrassment.
The military only said the suspect was apprehended by the troops at Damba community in Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna state. Such incomplete stories could only make citizens doubt the capacity of our men in uniform to help get a secured Nigeria.
Benue State citizens are probably among the most prominent Nigerian citizens who lost faith long ago. During the tenure of the immediate past Governor Samuel Ortom, a few people imagined that daily killings in Benue communities were exaggerated for political purposes. Now that the new governor belongs to the same ruling party as the President and therefore have no cause to be ‘intransigent’ as Ortom allegedly was, everyone had hoped that peace would return to Benue after May 2023.
It would seem that the hopes are misplaced as the new Governor Hyacint Alia has started vowing to fish out killer herdsmen in Benue state. Alia says his administration will not rest until the armed herdsmen responsible for the recent brutal murder of innocent persons in Wandoo community, Mbalom in Gwer East Local Government Area (LGA) of the state, are brought to justice. Who should the nation hold responsible for the unacceptable deaths? Why can’t government move faster on the issue of state police and isolate external bandits creating homeless people in Nigeria?
Many citizens are probably impressed with President Tinubu’s approach of accepting responsibility unlike his predecessors who hid comfortably under excuses. But because the approach visibly needs a buffer, it is time for Tinubu to be encouraged to show many officials charged with specific duties the way out when such duties fail. If such officials in charge of security in a state are asked to step aside for others to take control when security breaches occur in such a state, everyone will be become conscious that to hold an office is premised on the capacity and alertness of the office-holder to ensure that nothing under the office goes wrong. They should not only step aside but be made to account for each lapse. This task of holding people accountable must be differentiated from the camera talk-shows which the legislature often organizes with their so-called invitations to heads of Ministries, Parastals and Agencies. It is time to see changes in security matters in Nigeria.
The celebrations last week of the life and times of Herbert Wigwe sent me retrieving some Philosophy books from my study. There had to be a philosophical meaning to it all. How could a man at the peak of his professional career, with a network of friends and associates spread over all the continents, literally vaporise from our midst with his wife and first son in tow?
But the more I combed philosophy the more fuzzy I was. We are made up of body and soul, right? We leave the body behind when we expire and the soul rises to the afterlife where we are no longer constrained by the limitations of the physical world. Death, says Seneca, is a release from all suffering, and a boundary beyond which our ills cannot pass.
But this is little comfort. Based on the assumption that God is all good and all merciful, man continues to wonder why He would allow evil in the world. For, stripped of all niceties, as we say in Africa, there are very few happenings in the world that could be more horrendous than people predeceasing their fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts…
Philosophy Of Death
Even nature mourns when a green leaf falls from the Iroko tree while its withered, yellowed neighbours hang on as the fresher, healthier leaf falls to the earth. How cruel!
One of the few consolations I got from my philosophical foray was provided by the German, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who encouraged us to strive for greatness. He said the fear that we might die young should not deter us from striving to be great. The influence of great people lasts longer than their earthly lives — and that is good for society.
Therefore, he contends, death is not a misfortune. He emphasises the importance of “dying at the right time,” while our lives still call for celebration, and before we risk undermining the legacy we otherwise would leave others. “In your dying, your spirit and virtue should still glow like a sunset around the earth….”
Donald Robertson, in a piece titled “The Philosophy of death”, tries to soften the blow of death’s rude intervention. As everything has a season, so does the individual, he says. Your season, in the macro, is your life, and as the seasons pass, so too will you. In a paraphrasing of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, don’t ask yourself how long you’ll live, but rather, how you’ll live… In so doing, death may not be something terrible, but rather, a natural end to a life well-ordered.
Little comfort to grieving families, friends and associates!
The Real Wigwe
It is said that a corpse being ferried to its final resting place by pall bearers across the neighbourhood might as well have been a log of wood because it does not exact any emotional toll on passersby. He who feels it, knows it. In the case of Herbert Wigwe, however, even those not connected with him in any way found out that he shared the same humanity with them in many profound ways to such an extent that a colleague asked me how the 57-year-old banker and entrepreneur could have been such a well kept secret all these years!
Many people found out the real essence of the relatively young man after his death. Nigeria may be a country of 200 Naira-trillionaires and 200 million beggars, but there is still so much unsung goodness in the land as evidenced by tributes paid to Herbert last week.
Herbert Wigwe’s paths and mine never crossed. I have no reason whatsoever to be partial, one way or the other, in my assessment of his life and times. Unbelievably, despite being in the public eye everyday for the past quarter of a century, the real Herbert was largely unknown. The revelations made at the events organised by his family, friends and associates, and broadcast live on national and international networks, etched out the portrait of Herbert the humanist.
The cumulative effect of the tributes was that they painted a portrait of a human being with a heart of gold behind the name. Operating in the shark-infested waters of the Nigerian banking industry, was it realistic to expect operatives to conduct their affairs with a different set of rules, especially realising that the graveyard of Nigerian banking had many headstones of erstwhile top dogs? How did Jesus Christ handle that kind of ‘holier-than-thou’ situation? “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”! (John 8:7).
Speakers at the event told stories of how the 57-year-old banker and corporate player became their friend and earned the respect of the high and mighty around the world: from former President Bill Clinton of the US, to Emmanuel Macron of France, Bola Tinubu of Nigeria, Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, former Vice-President Osinbajo, a bagful of European and African presidents and prime ministers, top diplomats and the cream of the business and political leadership in Nigeria. He had something special going with each and every one of those whose paths crossed his.
Number Your Days
On January 19, 2024, Wigwe had shared his thoughts on his X (formerly Twitter) handle: “Today and always, let us remember that life is a precious gift – a chance to breathe, feel, love, experience and connect. Let’s honour this gift by living with purpose, kindness, and gratitude, making every moment count. Let us number our days.”
He apparently took his own advice.
Spellbinding narratives were shared, of how this unassuming banker carried out his philanthropy without fanfare and how his life positively affected those who knew him. There were so many stories of man’s humanity to fellow man to cement a legacy of giving, of lifting other people up, of being the candle whose light was not diminished by lighting other candles. There were very few dry eyes when the leader of the Tijaniyya movement and 14th Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, finished his testimony.
Governors, senators, rolled over each other to share their attestations. Also in attendance was the President of the African Development Bank, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, President of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria’s Finance Minister Wale Edun and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Olayemi Cardoso. It couldn’t have been stage-managed. Without being so tagged, this was virtually a state burial.
Nigeria’s Vice-President Kashim Shettima, in his speech titled, “Herbert Wigwe: The Flower That Bloomed Before Spring,” waxed lyrical: “Herbert left us in winter before the season of bloom. Spring was just about to arrive at his last location, the United States when the Lord called for him.
Spring is not the symbol of Herbert’s bloom; his journey was defined by peculiar seasons. He loomed long before his co-travellers. This spring, for us, isn’t the season of festive flowers; it’s the season of wreaths….”
Legacy
Wigwe’s legacy is assured. That much was evidenced by the pan-Nigerian, pan-African, even global outpouring of love on his demise. His family and friends have pledged to ensure the completion and sustenance of his Wigwe university project.
Posterity will not have cause to ask, “Who was Herbert Onyewumbu Wigwe?” They will encounter him in his contributions to a future that he wasn’t privileged to see. There will not be any iota of doubt that Herbert passed through these mortal shores.
To his family and friends, I commend you to the soothing lyrics of Lynda Randle:
The God on the mountain is still God in the valley When things go wrong, He’ll make them right And the God of the good times is still God in the bad times. The God of the day is still God in the night.
“The total amount of such advances outstanding shall not at any time exceed five per cent of the previous year’s actual revenue of the Federal Government” – Section 38 (2) of the CBN Act.
Every Nigerian now knows that the Buhari government obtained N30 trillion under Ways and Means, W&M, from the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, in eight years. Every naira represented pre-meditated economic sabotage; particularly when the transactions were undertaken without prior approval of the National Assembly, NASS, as required by another Section of the CBN Act.
Furthermore, we are now aware that there is no record of how the funds illegally collected were spent; and who were the recipients – again as required by law. Buhari and his co-conspirators were not only brazen, the former President is still not remorseful about actions bordering on treason committed under his watch. During a recent book launch, he actually said his government acted with transparency and accountability. That was despite the fact that the NASS was only aware of N23.7 trillion overdrawn from the CBN in a letter he wrote to them in January 2023.
Records now available have revealed that the infractions started from 2017 when his government was allowed to collect N1.1 trillion in W&M, against N2.95 billion revenue for 2016. What he collected in 2017 represented 37.2 per cent of the previous year’s revenue instead of the 5 per cent allowed by law. The truth was deliberately concealed by the FG, CBN and the Ministry of Finance from NASS and from the Nigerian people.
Obviously, his statement was deliberate and colossal lie – unbecoming of a former President.
Despite his poor education, it is difficult to understand how a President, who colluded with others for seven years to cover-up gross misdeeds, can stand in front of an audience and claim transparency and accountability long after he had revealed only part of the truth.
We now know that N30 trillion was illegally carted out of the CBN under cover of darkness; we also know that Buhari has ruined the efforts of his next four successors by asking a complaisant Senate, headed by Senate President Lawan, to convert all the funds to 40-year bond, with three years moratorium.
What all that means is this: The present generation of Nigerians and the next will be forced to pay for funds, literally stolen, from the CBN, without having an idea what we are paying for and why?
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
“A judge [or President] who cannot punish willful criminals, in the end, associates themselves with the criminals” – Goethe
Tinubu, a judge now, has not spoken about what his government intends to do about these unprecedented atrocities. Irrespective of his feelings as a founding father of the All Progressives Congress, APC, and the fact that he admittedly brought Buhari out of voluntary retirement, bank-rolled his successful bid for President and, therefore, shares responsibility for the disaster confronting Nigerians at the moment, he cannot shirk from punishing a serial, lawless and remorseless former President – who lacks the decency to apologise after the truth has blown up in his face. Just in case ethnic jingoists and other die-hard Buhari supporters think the indictment is too harsh, below is the evidence.
TABLE
NTRILLIONSYEAR FG REVENUE W&M COLLECTED %
2017 2.70 1.1 37.2
2018 3.87 2.1 77.8
2019 4.12 3.3 85.3
2020 4.04 4.4 107.0
2021 4.64 4.3 106.4.
2022 6.49 6.4 138.0
Clearly, we are not dealing with a President and co-conspirators, who deviated just once and inadvertently from the five per cent legal limit. What we have on our hands is Executive lawlessness beyond comparison with anything this nation has ever experienced. Buhari and Co have proved, once again, that appetite indeed grows with eating. Each year’s larceny emboldened them to commit more transgressions with impunity.
Readers who must be wondering about what happened to the former Buhari we all regarded most highly only need to remember that the acid test of honesty is money; of integrity is power. Buhari, in 2015, had both in his grasp because millions of us trusted him. There is evidence beyond reasonable doubt that we were mistaken. Just look at the table; and ask yourself if a person with a reputation to protect, and anxious to do so, could have done that to his country. He drove the Nigerian economy into a ditch from which we might not get out for 20 years.
Unless Tinubu is tired of his job, the first priority of his government is to stop chasing bush rats when buffaloes and other big games are waiting to be brought down. Certainly, N30 trillion has not vanished into thin air. A great percentage of it might still be traced in Nigeria and abroad. Without wasting too much time, Tinubu should address the nation, proclaim a state of economic emergency and round up all those involved in the heist of N30 trillion.
Court orders should be obtained to seize all their assets – including homes until they are ready to vomit as much as possible of what they illegally took from the nation’s treasury. And, since the Buhari administration has proved, once again, that fish rots from the head, the man who was at the head of it all cannot expect to sit in comfort at Daura while Nigerians suffer. It will amount to injustice of the worst kind.
To be quite candid, Buhari treated and still treats the entire country with disdain. Otherwise, how does one explain a situation in which he belatedly sent a letter to the NASS asking that money already spent, without prior approval be converted to a long term loan – WITHOUT DETAILS!!! This is bold-faced criminality without remorse. The only plausible explanation would shock Nigerians to the marrows. It is quite possible that there are no details; no records. Designated people apparently just drove to CBN in the middle of the night, waved bogus documents, and loaded trucks with newly-minted cash.
WAS EMEFIELE BLACKMAILED OR THREATENED?
“Russia is a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma” – Sir Winston Churchill, November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965
Of all the culprits, Godwin Emefiele, the former Governor, will remain, like Russia, the most baffling. We met once in 2019 and that was when his re-appointment was still in doubt. Before then, he had struck me as a great achiever as CBN Governor. Working with an FG headed by an economic illiterate and Ministers of Finance, just a little bit better than the boss, Emefiele was called upon to handle all of monetary policy as well as a great deal of fiscal policy management. No previous CBN Governor ever enjoyed such powers – it was almost absolute. But, we all know what absolute power does to humans. Our meeting lasted approximately one hour. My questions focused on professionalism, how he was handling the inherent problems involved in managing both monetary and fiscal policies; and the ethical dilemma involved in that situation. His answers were convincing. But, we now know that there was no hint of W&M violations.
Now that the truth is out, Emefiele has the most difficult defence. Although, ignorance has never been an acceptable plea where grand larceny repeated committed is concerned, Buhari can still try it by pointing to his poor education.
Emefiele cannot pretend not to know the meaning of Section 38 (2) of the CBN Act. For that matter, none of the Deputy Governors from 2017 to 2023 should escape prosecution for this gross and planned violation of a basic regulation. What puzzles me is this: Was Emefiele blackmailed or threatened to go along with the greatest scam in CBN history?
To be continued…
FUND ME TO WRITE THE TRUTH ABOUT BUHARI
“I always look very hard at any one who is above suspicion” – Agatha Christie, 1890-1976
Christie was the most prolific writer on crime in the last century. I must have read at least fifteen of her books while researching for quotes for the VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS. She was being interviewed on NBC TV one day, in 1973, when the question was asked: “How can one summarise your books?” The statement above was her short and sharp answer. I quickly jotted it in my notebook; it has remained my guide ever since.
Today, 51 years after that declaration, and with Nigerians wondering how N30 trillion was illegally withdrawn from the CBN; and the crimes covered up until last year, nobody can convince me that Buhari did not orchestrate the illegal withdrawals. To convince Nigerians, Tinubu would have to conduct a full probe into the episode – document by document.
Pastors of some Pentecostal churches, bearing false witness, after collecting “30 shekels of silver”, can never be relied upon to tell the truth. They have written their own books. In it, you will not read about N30 trillion illegally taken from the CBN.
In mine, you will discover how reckless Buhari was.
Let us write the true history of Buhari’s misrule together. Get in touch.
We are about to witness a mud fight between two gods of integrity. In Nigeria where the mantra is if you see something, say something, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, elected to say something. And he did say something last Wednesday. “We talked about inflation, where has it come from? It’s come from eight years of just printing money. And the issue is that that money was not matched by productivity…For eight years, the weak were left to their own devices. It is the privileged few that took everything” he said while appearing before the Senate Committee on Finance.
Edun’s appearance in the senate was a total shellacking of the administration of Mai Gaskiya, Muhammadu Buhari. Falling short of naming that government one in the same frame as Ali Baba And the Forty Thieves, Edun accused Buhari of every conceivable economic malfeasance, finally heaping the blame for Nigeria’s current economic regression at his doorsteps. He promised that the Tinubu government would audit the N22.7 trillion ways and means advance that the Buhari regime incurred.
Bashir Ahmad, former media aide to Buhari, was however of the opinion that blame-shoveling was bad politics. Comparatively, he said, the PDP was better at dressing its stench in pleasant deodorant. Posting on X, Ahmad wrote: “I often wonder why, as a government, we concentrate more on amplifying the faults of the previous administration rather than acknowledging its numerous achievements. The PDP seems to have a more skilful approach to politics than we do in the APC…it’s rare to find instances where President Yar’adua’s (PDP) government criticized President Obasanjo’s (PDP) or where President Jonathan’s (PDP) government faulted President Yar’adua’s (PDP)”.
What they cooked that burnt down the house of Nigeria is gradually exposing itself. Get your popcorn and be ready for the rumble in the jungle. When someone tries to hide behind their finger, my people compare them to the exact scenario that both Bola Tinubu and Buhari find themselves in today. Their story is perfectly told in the Epa and Aja tale. The tick, which the Yoruba call Epa, is a parasitic member of the Arachnida family of insects. Arachnids are a class of joint-legged arthropods which include, among others, spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites, etc. As parasites, they feed on mammals, birds, and sometimes reptiles and amphibians. They feed on the blood of their hosts by attaching to them firmly with their proboscis. In consuming their blood, ticks satisfy their nutritional requirements. When a tick parasitizes its hosts, it acts as a vector through which serious diseases that affect humans and animals are transmitted into the host. Eventually, while the tick is satisfying its survival quest, the host will suffer either diseases or anaemia and eventually die. So, when Epa assumes that it is killing the host; take, for instance, Aja, the dog, unbeknown to it, it is killing itself. The day the dog dies, the tick dies too. Yoruba express this as “Epa npa’ra e, o l’ohun npa’ja”.
Though he may right now be sunk in the pastime of feeding his cows in Daura, the truth is, Muhammadu Buhari’s self-imposed title of Mai Gaskiya may be on its way out of the retired General’s lapel. There is an ongoing attempt to deconstruct him as either the most naïvely inept Nigerian president to have lived or the imbecilic landlord who opened his house to burglars and watched while they looted his treasure. Buhari’s political party, the APC-led government, is spearheading this deconstruction. So, should his successor, living through the mantra of “see something, say something” which has seized the information highway today, keep sealed lips and not disclose the alleged massive theft of Nigerian patrimony that it is privy to? Should Tinubu see the wound on the sole of his foot as one that has familial imprimatur and thus walk loose with it? Should he say something about the massive theft that went on during the Buhari government which he has information about or say nothing? Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edu, chose the latter.
Either as blame-shovelling or “saying something when something is seen”, Buhari looks like he is in very bad shape, image-wise. He has unfortunately landed in the hands of a successor government that is ready to scapegoat anything in sight to justify its inertia. Already, it is clear to everyone that if there is one thing in surplusage from this government today, it is blame-shoveling and immense capacity to reverse itself. In the last nine months, we have seen the government blame everybody, everything but itself for its inability to do the magic it advertised so ebulliently during the campaigns. COVID-19, Godwin Emefiele, PDP, Buhari and all that ought-nots have suffered this victimhood of the government’s antics.
Edun and this government have also blamed Emefiele’s alleged reckless spending of the overdraft that the Buhari government collected from the CBN as largely accounting for the food and security crises that Nigeria is battling. Right now, Nigeria is seeking Interpol’s help to arrest three suspects alleged to have stolen the sum of $6.2 million from the CBN, using Buhari’s forged signature. They are believed to have done this in cahoots with Emefiele who is on trial on 20-count charges. My haunch is that, if Emefiele has his days in court, the courtroom will explode like Hiroshima did and the matter may drift off like a fog, similar to the Sambo Dasuki security fund scandal. In the same vein, this government has reversed itself so effortlessly on policies it advertised with glee like Jay Jay Okocha did on the field of play. The last reverse was the annual levy it imposed on expatriates which it revoked pre-beginning last week.
For an administration like the Tinubu government that is tottering in pitch darkness and fumbling for a way out, the eternal wisdom in the tale of the tick and dog seems self-explanatory and self-evident. The “Epa npa’ra e…” presents in several nuggets. First is that it can come in the form of the question that has been asked repeatedly: How can the Tinubu government, and virtually all its runners, divorce themselves from the eight-year colossal wastage and failure of the Buhari government? The president, like a nursing mother, hunchbacked Buhari into power and gave him the wings with which he flew. Until a railway line halved them into their two separate ways, Tinubu defended every one of the Buhari policies with the vigour of a matador. From insecurity, Fulani herders’ rapacious bloodletting, (where are the cows?) to dwindling economy and every allied matter of state policy, Tinubu was there for Buhari. Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to the president, has almost had the mucus dripping out of one of his nostrils flip inside the second as he struggles to claim that Tinubu never requested Buhari to enter the forest of the brave – the Igbo igbale. So, for the Tinubu government, through Edun last week, to surgically try to separate itself from the Buhari government will be akin to an Epa which is trying to kill the Aja. Edun, with froth metaphorically foaming out of his mouth, attempted to do that last week.
Unfortunately for the government, head or tail, it loses. This is even if it listens to the self-centred counsel of Ahmad and elects to make the calamity wrought by the Buhari government a family affair. Its situation would be comparable to that of a man all alone inside a bunker who decides to allow a stench-like fart to escape from his buttock. He, all alone, will bear the stench. How reconcilable would it be for Tinubu to say that the Buhari he deodorised as recently as December last year, as emanating “from the rarest phylum of virtuous servant-leaders,” whose emergence could be likened to that of “leaders…(that) happens only by divine orchestration,” a man of “absolute and undiluted integrity” had now been discovered to have sat on a government that is surrounded by a mass of maggots?
We were still battling the waywardness found in the Buhari government’s Ways and Means when, as usual, Nigeria relapsed into its perennial orgy of massive kidnap of school pupils. The latest happened last Thursday at the Government Secondary School and LEA Primary School, Kuriga, Kaduna state. About 280 pupils and teachers were said to have been abducted by bandits. This has triggered national outrage. The bandits were reported to have invaded the Kuriga area of the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna state by shooting at their victims in a Gestapo manner. As usual of Nigerian Aso Rock Villa, the government is flexing its effeminate muscles and throwing threats into the sky. Sub-nationals and individuals too have tethered their usual empathy offering at the grove of this rapacious god of banditry.
The incessant incidences of kidnapping in Nigeria have grown into a hydra. They have become a source of national threat. Nigeria, according to researchers, boasts of phenomenally large public and private schools which are nearly 97,000, the largest in Africa. Its primary education sector, according to Aly Verjee and Chris Kwaja, is roughly equivalent in size to the 98,000 public elementary and secondary schools in the United States. Today, these schools are under severe threat from terrorists.
The above-named scholars collated the history of Nigeria’s bloodletting. According to them, in their research work entitled An Epidemic of Kidnapping: Interpreting School Abductions and Insecurity in Nigeria (African Studies Quarterly Volume 20, Issue 3, October 2021) beginning in 2014, “the small, nondescript town of Chibok in Borno State in northeast Nigeria” earned the notoriety worldwide with the abduction of 276 girls. Since then, Nigerian northern schools have known no peace. Though the abduction sparked global outrage, Nigerian governments have moved on nevertheless. The Chibok abduction which was the cusp upon which the APC government wove its political campaign to seize power from Jonathan in the 2015 election, contributed immensely to the defeat of Jonathan. He was accused of mishandling the kidnapping. However, some top persons in this government were alleged to have organized it to embarrass Jonathan. Buhari thereafter campaigned on a pedestal of promise to restore security to Nigerians.
The scholars’ collation of the spate of kidnappings is frightening. According to them, before Chibok, other kidnaps were carried out though they attracted fewer media campaigns. This was because the AC, CPC alignment and realignment were afoot and the masters of media orchestration in the AC had not aligned with the Buhari CPC. In 2013, 41 students and one teacher were shot/burned alive at the Mamudo Government Secondary School in Yobe state. The same year, another 44 students and teachers were murdered in a separate incident at the College of Agriculture, Gujba, about 120km east of Mamudo, reported Verjee and Kwaja. Similarly, in February 2014, another educational institution in Yobe State, which happened to be the fourth, was attacked. After the attack, 59 students were killed at the Buni Yadi Federal Government College, 30km south of Gujba. This was followed by the Chibok abductions in April 2014. With Buhari, the man who flaunted his epaulettes as a military general in civilian attire now in office, 110 girls got abducted from the Government Girls Science Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State in February 2018.
December of that year, said Verjee and Kwaja, saw another mass abduction in Buhari’s home state of Katsina. More than 300 boys were forcefully taken out of the Kankara Government Science Secondary School. Equally, on December 19 of that same year, 18 students of an Islamic school in Dandume, close to Kankara, were detained by a kidnapping group, while in February 2021, 42 people, which included 27 students, were kidnapped from the Government Science College in Kagara, Niger State. On February 26, figures bandied, that between 279 and 317 students, were kidnapped from the Government Girls Secondary School in Jangebe, Zamfara State. In March 2021, there were two further mass abductions and three attempted abductions, all in Kaduna State. On March 11, 39 students were abducted from the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization in Mando. A tip-off to the Nigerian Army averted the kidnap on March 13 of pupils of the Turkish International Secondary School, Rigachikun. On April 20 of the same year, 20 students and three staff of Greenfield University in Chikun, Kaduna State were abducted. Five of them were killed by their captors. Plateau State was to get its share on April 29 when four students were abducted from the King’s School, in Gana Ropp, Barkin Ladi. Then, on May 30, 136 children and several teachers were taken from the Salihu Tanko Islamic School in Tegina, Niger State. In June, 103 students were abducted from the Federal Government Girls College in Birnin Yauri, Kebbi State and on July 5, 121 children were abducted from the Bethel Baptist High School in Maramara, Kaduna State. So many more that space would not allow us to reel into what happened as figures provided by Verjee and Kwaja.
It will appear that, under Tinubu, Nigeria has entered its season of kidnap epidemic again. In the paper under discourse, Verjee and Kwaja made some recommendations that I found to be very profound. The first is that successive Nigerian governments have conflated the social challenge of kidnap with security challenges and as such, have solely treated school abductions as security problems which needed to be solved solely by military response. The government does this by fortifying the schools. In doing this, Nigeria is merely treating symptoms rather than a national disease. Why it is impossible to get a let out of this is that, first, due to the large scale of Nigeria’s education system, deployment of soldiers and police in the protection of schools can never work.
Rather, according to Verjee and Kwaja, the government must first address the trust deficit that exists between state security actors and the people. A very meagre percentage of Nigerians perceive state security actors as credible. They have always had a checkered history of corruption and violence. There is a profound belief out there that Nigeria’s top security chiefs do not want insecurity to end due to the money they make from it. This perception fuels further fear of militarization and repression, leading to the predatory behaviour of state security actors.
Whatever it will take, Nigeria must get to solve the pandemic of school kidnappings. The audaciousness of its perpetrators and the seeming combination of many forces in carrying out the kidnappings make it very complex to get rid of. We must also realize that this epidemic is just a tiny fraction of Nigeria’s political economy of violence. We have always had an ineffective and underperforming state, as well as sparse economic opportunities which have been fueling the school kidnappings. Already, the Kaduna government has rented private negotiators to secure the release of the kids. At the end of the day, multiple millions of Naira would be paid to these no-gooders and like the boulder of Sisyphus, in no long time, the terrorists will strike again. And Nigeria will begin another round of sorrow, tears and blood.
Three weeks ago, maybe even four, I got a message from my mobile phone company asking me to re-register my line and link it to the national identification number, aka NIN, else I would be barred. I murmured to myself: “Here we go again!” How many times will I link my line to NIN? I scampered down memory lane and disgust overpowered me. It seems some people in government wake up every day asking themselves: what more can we do today to destabilise and demoralise Nigerians? It appears they are never at peace until they inflict disruption and discomfort on millions of Nigerians through obnoxious policies and directives. That is their understanding of imagination and innovation.
In this article, I will give seven instances on this biometric enrolment epidemic. First, in 2010, we were directed by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to register our SIM cards. I went to a centre close to my estate to give my mother’s maiden name to some random individual eating noodles under an umbrella by the roadside. It felt so uncomfortable. Months later, I was informed by my telco that I was yet to register and that my line would be barred. I was perplexed. I called a friend at the NCC and he said my telco was bluffing. As it turned out, the data captured by the roadside noodle eaters could not be integrated into the telcos’ systems because of compatibility issues.
The entire NCC registration exercise was null. We wasted millions of dollars on the contracts and never heard anything about it again — but is it not Nigeria? We simply moved to the next level — my second instance — when the NCC issued another directive that all SIM cards must be registered by 2015. This time around, I went to the airconditioned office of my service provider and felt more comfortable telling them my mother’s maiden name. It worked this time as nobody threatened to cut off my line again. But when my sister, at the point of death in a Kano hospital in September 2015, desperately said “I want to talk to my brother”, her line had been barred, albeit it was registered.
She died without being able to talk to me. Till today, I still live with the trauma of wondering what she wanted to tell me. It pains me I would never know — not because she disobeyed the directive to register her line but because of our sloppy system. We had hardly calmed down with SIM registration when we were asked to get a bank verification number (BVN). We were threatened again that our accounts would be blocked if we did not obey the order. We queued in the sun and under the rain to get the BVN. We gave our mothers’ maiden names again, in addition to the very invasive capturing of our biometrics — something done only to criminal suspects and foreigners in advanced societies.
Most of us survived the BVN badgering but those who didn’t had to suffer the severe inconvenience for months. We were still catching our breath when we were ordered to register for NIN — my fourth example — otherwise we would not be able to get a passport or write university entrance exams. We queued up again, come rain or shine, to do the “needful”. Registration centres became like police checkpoints where extortion is the means of value exchange, if you know what I mean. There were people who spent days and weeks trying to register. But the registration was not enough — there was another one called “verification” which also provided a sweet opening for more extortion.
The fifth instance was the instruction to link NIN to our phone lines in 2021 — when COVID-19 was still killing people. Otherwise, our lines would be barred. Old, young, elderly and sick people had no other option than to flood the registration centres again. Ordinarily, if you already have a NIN, there should be a very easy way to add your number since all your details have already been captured by both the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), which manages NIN, and the telcos. It should be as simple as going to a portal to do the linking. Interestingly, or luckily, NIMC eventually came up with an app to make life easier, and I can remember registering all my lines via the app.
Not so fast: the sixth instance was coming. That was when I got a message from my telco to link my NIN to my line by February 29, 2024 or I would face the consequences. I was baffled. What happened to the “linking” of 2021? Has it expired? Thinking I was smart, I quickly opened my NIMC app. Alas, I could no longer access my linked numbers. It kept telling me “unauthorised access”. I went to another menu and finally saw my linked numbers — but my main line had disappeared. I clicked the “add number” button and was told a one-time password (OTP) had been sent to me. I am still waiting for the great OTP — after trying my luck a million times since February. I now do it for fun.
Now, wait for the seventh instance. I got a mail from my bank that I should add my NIN to my account, otherwise what happened in 1979 would repeat itself (if you don’t know the Okey Bakassi joke, accept my sympathy). This is the mystery: my account has a BVN, and it was from this BVN that my NIN was generated (well, that was what the NIMC lady that registered me for NIN said). If my NIN was indeed generated from my BVN, why do I have to link my NIN again? Comically, all the banks that said we could link our NIN via their internet banking platforms were only “using us to play”. There is no such menu or portal or function or button on their sites. After checking for three banks, I gave up.
The good news is that I decided to spend a whole day going from bank to bank to link my NIN so that nobody would stop me from accessing my bank account for no fault of mine. The bank officer who attended to me at my first port of call said my line was linked to many accounts, so I should change my phone number, otherwise he would not be able to link my NIN. I wanted to treat it as a joke but he was not laughing. I stood my ground. He buckled. I thereafter went to my telco to re-link my NIN. I was No. 225 on the queue. I’m not joking. I met many sad and tired Nigerians who had spent hours on the queue. I felt nothing but pity for them. This is what Nigeria does to its citizens all the time.
When I was done re-linking my NIN to my mobile line, I headed for the second bank to obey the latest CBN directive. The security guy at the main gate approached me to find out what I was looking for. I said I wanted to do the needful. He said it was past 4pm and the bank had closed. That was when I realised I had lost my sense of time. Hungry and frustrated, I drove straight home wondering why Nigeria routinely does this kind of thing to its citizens. It is an annual punishment. The philosophy of our policymakers seems to be: why make life easier when it can be complicated? I can bet that there is more in the offing. Soon, we may be asked to link our BVNs to our driving licences.
Even though I sound as if I am angry or bitter or sad, the truth is that it is the poor and lowly people I really feel for. I am an employer. I can somehow afford to burn one day going from one bank to the other to link NIN and all that, but millions of Nigerians do not enjoy that luxury. Their lives depend on daily earnings. They are not asking government for contracts. They are not asking government to pay them welfare support. All they want to do is work with their own hands to feed themselves. But that is not good enough for the policymakers. There must be a new directive to disrupt their lives and send them on unsettling errands that can be done on a smart phone. Millions of lines were cut off.
By the way, I have nothing against BVN or NIN — or linking the national ID to our phone lines. I need to be clear about that. I am cool with whatever measures the government wants to take to tackle terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, money laundering and other crimes. The authorities owe us the duty of making our country safe and secure — and we, the citizens, have the duty of supporting and co-operating with them. But must they make life this miserable for us in the process? Robert Nesta Marley, the reggae legend, captured it in these lines: ‘They made their world so hard/Every day we got to keep on fighting.’ If you drink ordinary water in Nigeria, you will need to use a toothpick.
The wickedness of our policymakers does not have any limit. They woke up one day in 2022 and decreed that they were going to re-colour naira to “fight corruption”. After sadistically making sure there wasn’t enough cash in circulation, they confiscated the old notes from us until the Supreme Court came to the rescue. They ensured electronic channels did not work well so that bank transfers would be tough. People died in the process. According to authoritative rumours, the policy was to stop Asiwaju Bola Tinubu from winning the presidential poll. The lives and livelihoods of millions of Nigerians were ruined. The Nigerian economy was mutilated. And Tinubu still became president.
The way government has handled SIM registration, BVN and NIN shows the poverty of thinking, the abject lack of rigour, in policymaking in our dearly beloved country. Someone comes up with a proposal and says “Oga, better dey for you o” and it becomes a policy with discomfiting deadlines. The idea will not be tested, the decisionmakers will not think through it and the financial or human costs are never considered. All they want to do is make money, even if the economy will be ruined in the process. Why must anybody go physically to a bank or a telco to link their NIN when all the details have already been captured on a system that we spent millions of dollars to build? Why?
I would like to be a fly on the wall when some of these heartless policies are being discussed. I would like to know if there is any sane human being in the room who highlights the impact of these directives and orders on Nigerians. I have this funny feeling that most people in power are facing the same direction. Maybe those who have contrary opinions often decide to shut up so that they would not lose their positions or get branded as renegades. I do not know. I am just guessing. But I wish that policymakers would stop treating Nigerians like goats. Life does not have to be this hard over things that can be simplified with the help of common sense. As if things are not hard enough.
AND FOUR OTHER THINGS…
KURIGA KIDNAPPINGS
The spate of abductions in northern Nigeria in the past few days is very frightening. Nearly 300 school children were abducted from Kuriga, Kaduna state, on Thursday — a sad reminder of the Chibok kidnappings of 2014. Someone asked if this and other incidents are not co-ordinated or if the economic hardship is instigating an upsurge in criminal activities. As expected, some politicians are seizing the opportunity to play politics, as we saw with the Chibok abductions. Whatever the case may be, President Tinubu must realise that securing the country is his primary responsibility and no excuse is acceptable. We want to see action and results, not rhetoric or blame-trading. Urgent.
ANOTHER ORONSAYE
Another week, another agency. Since President Tinubu “ordered” the implementation of the Oronsaye Report to cut the size of federal bodies, the National Assembly has kickstarted the process of establishing more. It was Peace Corps in week one. In week two, it was the National Tax Crimes and Oversight Commission — the function well performed by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS). This is a clear indication of the quality of thinking in certain circles and a disturbing confirmation of a lack of purpose. At this rate, we may need to set up another Oronsaye Committee to rationalise the new agencies and commissions being created after Tinubu’s directive. Dissonance.
POWER PLAY
Chief Bayo Adelabu, minister of power, spat fire on Wednesday over the dire power situation in the country. He “summoned” the chief executives of distribution companies (DisCos) and threatened to revoke their licences. He said despite all efforts to improve generation, “Certain distribution companies are failing to adequately distribute the power supplied by TCN (the transmission company).” I am a bit baffled. Is it possible to hold back power that is already on the grid? Where will the DisCos keep it? I understand that Adelabu is under pressure because of public criticism, but he needs to be calming down to be able to understand the sector before issuing threats. Complicated.
NO COMMENT
Have you heard the latest? A forensic analyst told an FCT high court on Thursday that the documents used to request the payment of $6.2 million for unnamed foreign election observers were forged. Mr Bamaiyi Meriga, the forensic analyst, confirmed earlier claims by Boss Mustapha, former secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), that President Muhammadu Buhari’s letter and signature were forged. Fellow Nigerians, I always claim that “I have seen it all” but there is definitely still more to unfold about how rotten our Nigeria is. You mean $6.2 million could be so easily taken out of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) without due diligence such as checks and confirmations? Wonderful.
[OPINION] Re: Edun And Cardoso: Ikoyi-Bred Economists Trying to Operate a Fadeyi Economy - Jesutega Onokpasa
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There is a presently trending article by Ope Banwo, titled "Edun and Cardoso: Ikoyi-bred economists trying to operate a Fadeyi economy".
I suspect the article is trending more for its heading than its body, in other words, on account of the equivalent of a catchy soundbite rather than on the basis of actual substance.
While, Banwo's article is high on criticism regarding how Wale Edun, Minister for Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, and, Michael Olayemi Cardoso, Governor of the Central Bank, are running the Nigerian economy, it is unfortunately rather anaemic when it comes to offering alternatives to what he carpets as Edun and Cardoso's "Ikoyi" approach.
Nevertheless, given that he laments what he claims is the incongruity of "Ikoyi-bred economists" managing a "Fadeyi economy", one can safely conclude that he thereby submits that there is such a thing as "Fadeyi economics".
Indeed, since he purposes to discern a difference between "Ikoyi economics" and its Fadeyi counterpart, I will take the liberty of his own terms to demonstrate how wrongly he has formulated the problem he purports to lament.
Perhaps a "Fadeyi Approach" to managing an economy could be similar to the unorthodox approaches the Buhari/Idiagbon Junta deployed in managing our national economy back in the mid eighties.
That "Fadeyi Approach" ended up in complete disaster for the Nigerian economy.
Or again, maybe it could be likened to quite populist but miserably foolhardy policies, such as taking over white-owned farms which Robert Mugabe implemented in Zimbabwe that led to the tanking of that country's economy.
I really wouldn't know what Banwo truly had in mind because he didn't even end up adequately sharing it in his article but perhaps a typical Lagosian might come up with a "Bole Kaja Approach" to managing a "Fadeyi economy" as a fitting synonym for Banwo's prescription.
What I'm pretty sure of is that "Bole Kaja" rules will leave the passengers stuck in that bygone mode of transport and they will only be able to step up to a clean energy-powered high speed train, for instance, by adopting and playing by "clean energy-powered high speed train rules".
Another thing I am cast iron positive about is that unorthodoxy is the very worst strategy for economic management or economic rescue and, in fact, has never worked anywhere in the world!
Ironically, the only approach that actually works is what Banwo derides as the "Ikoyi Approach"!
Funny enough, a very big problem with Banwo's offering is that he appears to have gotten his metaphors mixed up, an indication that he failed to properly identify the problem he purported to be prescribing a solution to.
It is not because anyone has been applying "Ikoyi models" to a "Fadeyi economy" that we are were we are today.
On the contrary, it is the opposite that is true; successive administrations in this country have been tolerating, even aiding and abetting, if not actively perpetrating, "Fadeyi behaviour" in what can ONLY exist as an "Ikoyi economy", and, THRIVE upon an "Ikoyi Approach" to its management.
Any economy, anywhere in the world, can only thrive if all players and stakeholders in that economy play by the rules.
Regardless of how intellectually sound or academically intact the economic policies deployed in the management of absolutely any economy, they will not work or yield the desired results unless people play by transparent, ascertanable, verifiable rules that are known to and are binding on absolutely everyone.
We cannot have people lavishing on preferential treatment; gorging on waivers, helping themselves to insane chunks of our national wealth; round-tripping precious foreign exchange; creating monopolies in an economy of 200 million plus people; muscling their competition out of contention; sabotaging the national economy through price fixing, smuggling and hoarding while creating cartels on consumer goods; or, and perhaps worst of all, arbitrarily increasing prices without commensurately raising employees' remunerations in consonance with what ought to constitute the labour component of their cost of production.
In other words, what Cardoso and Edun must realize is that their "Ikoyi methodology" will simply not work unless they bring those who play by the "Fadeyi rules" to heel and compel them to play by the "Ikoyi rules", which are the only rules by which any economy works for everyone, be they Fadeyi or Ikoyi folk.
Banwo sought to give the impression that Edun and Cardoso are at sea regarding their management of the Nigerian economy.
I believe his true intent was to drape the President Bola Tinubu administration in the gab of incompetence.
Unfortunately for him, the facts are inconsistent with his perception.
Despite the challenges our citizens are passing through, the omens are actually good and quite promising, for that matter.
The administration is not yet a year in office but its policies and programs are already yielding favourable results that constitute a solid basis of hope for the economic revitalization of our country.
It will take time for these reforms to take root, grow strong and bear fruit.
There is not very much we can do to hasten the period between the planting of the reforms and the harvesting of the fruits they will bear, but there is a lot we can do to stubbornly cultivate and sustainably nurture them to fruition.
Contrary to the despondent narratives of the likes of Banwo, President Tinubu is on the right course and has placed our country on the right track to success.
Ours may indeed be a "Fadeyi economy" but managing it in accordance with a "Fadeyi paradigm" will only continue to strand it at Fadeyi if not demote to Makoko.
In order to upgrade it to an "Ikoyi economy", the only economy that works fairly for everyone, the "Ikoyi Approach" must be forced down everyone's throat, indeed, whether they like it or not.
Onokpasa, a lawyer, is Chairman, Tinubu Media Support Group, TMSG, and writes from Abuja.
[OPINION] Adieu, The Honourable Justice Theresa Ngolika Orji-Abadua, A True Champion Of The Law, And An Embodiment Of Grace - Olukayode Ajulo, SAN
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Upon receiving the sorrowful news of the passing of my esteemed Lord, the Honourable Justice Theresa Ngolika Orji-Abadua, my heart is overcome with profound sadness, and my thoughts are flooded with memories of a truly noble, exquisite, and exceptional jurist.
Those fortunate enough to have graced her presence knew that Justice Orji-Abadua possessed a keen intellect, accompanied by a remarkable wit and sense of humor. Her courtroom was a stage where justice unfurled, guided by her unwavering belief in the strict adherence to the law and its principles. It was a privilege and a joy for me to always stand before her, for she commanded respect and nurtured an atmosphere of equity and impartiality.
I vividly recall my last appearance before her at the Ekiti judicial division of the Court of Appeal. It was a criminal case, wherein I fought for the life of a young man, Bamiteko Adeolu, whose existence hung in the balance when he was sentenced to death by hanging by the Ekiti State High Court of Justice. The magnitude of the matter seemed insurmountable, and during the preliminary stage of the appeal, due to some minor technicalities which my Lord, Honourable Justice Orji-Abadua as the Presiding Judge emphasized, I nearly succumbed to frustration and contemplated abandoning the case. However, Justice Orji-Abadua, unwavering in her pursuit of justice, insisted that the right course of action be taken. With her wisdom and discernment, she upheld the appeal, sparing the young man from a death sentence. To this day, Adeolu Bamiteko lives, a testament to her unwavering dedication to justice.
Justice Orji-Abadua's legacy extends far beyond the confines of the courtroom. She leaves behind a profound impact on the legal profession, inspiring generations of aspiring jurists to walk in her footsteps. Her devotion to the law, her unwavering pursuit of justice, and her resolute commitment to upholding the rights of the oppressed serve as a guiding light for us all. She was also a paragon of fashion, never settling for anything less than the epitome of a jurist.
Today, I offer my heartfelt homage and bid farewell to this noble soul, as I implore my esteemed lords and colleagues to carry forth her torch of justice. May her legacy serve as a constant reminder of the power of integrity, compassion, and resilience in the face of adversity. May her memory inspire us to strive for a world where justice prevails, and may her noble spirit find eternal peace.
Rest in peace, The Honourable Justice Theresa Ngolika Orji-Abadua. You shall forever be remembered as a true champion of the law, a beacon of justice, and an embodiment of grace.
Farewell, my noble Lord.
Dr Olukayode Ajulo, OON, SAN, FCIArb. UK
The Honourable Attorney General & Commissioner of Justice, Ondo State.
[OPINION] Over 200,000 Lawyers In Nigeria But The Sky Is Big Enough For Every Lawyer To Fly - Stanley Alieke
AdminI read a post on Twitter from a user who posted a picture from the recent call-to-bar ceremony where thousands of lawyers were inducted into the Nigerian bar. She asked, “Where do all these numerous new lawyers will see work?”.
Well, statistically speaking, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) welcomes at least five thousand (5000) new members on a yearly basis and records available show that there are over two hundred thousand (200000) active lawyers presently in Nigeria. So the poster is not wrong to have curiosity asked where these enormous numbers of new lawyers recently inducted will see work as it appears that the market is already saturated.
To be fair, it is not just the Nigerian legal labour market that is saturated, every field of endeavour is saturated, and both white-collar, brown collar and even red-collar markets are all saturated. There is an enormous amount of workforce birthed into the Nigerian system annually for them to scramble for the meagre jobs available.
I recently sent out a public post that we have a vacancy for two new lawyers to join our firm and I got over a hundred applications from both young lawyers and older lawyers for that advert. That’s how saturated the market is.
This is why I found it ridiculous when I read that the Nigerian government is working with the British government so that UK-trained lawyers can practice in Nigeria. If it worked out, it would have been suicidal for every Nigerian lawyer practising in Nigeria, including the bigwigs. (More on this later).
But without the risk of sounding harsh, it is embarrassing for you as a lawyer to be applying for jobs or submitting your CV up and down. As a lawyer, you have been trained to literally do anything legal to feed yourself and survive. You can excel in any human endeavour you find yourself. If there are no jobs for you, as a lawyer, you have been trained to create jobs for yourself and by extension create jobs for other persons.
The good news is that the legal market will never be saturated and lawyers will never go out of jobs despite any technological invention or any AI, no matter how sophisticated it gets, there will always be a need for human lawyers. The two hundred active lawyers currently in Nigeria are not even enough to cater for the Nigerian legal market of over two hundred million customers/ clients. So the sky is big enough for all the two hundred thousand lawyers to fly and to excel individually. The better news is that we are not just servicing the two hundred million persons market, we are servicing an international market of over 7 billion clients.
Foreign investors have been penetrating Nigeria aggressively and Nigerian lawyers are the ones advising and sealing the deals. Recently Udo Udoma and Bello Osagie law firm (a Nigerian law firm) was the one that advised Universal Music group on their recent acquisition of Don Jazzy’s Marvin record label that made the news some days ago and they were paid handsomely for it. I too have numerous foreign clients scattered in different nations of the earth. When investors of foreign clients come into Nigeria for some deals, they must engage a Nigerian lawyer or a lawyer who has been licensed to practice in Nigeria. So we are not in the market for just Nigerian clients, we are in the market where our clients are in every part of the world.
Interestingly, some big law firms in Nigeria are even already branching out and dominating other countries. Templars recently branched out to the Ghana, Olaniwun Ajayi LP already branched out to the UK, my former boss, Dr Kayode Ajulo, has a branch in Gambia and Ghana and numerous other law firms have presence in other countries including non-English speaking countries like Cameron, France and even China.
So as a young lawyer, don’t ever feel agitated that the market is already saturated and you will be bereft of jobs, believe me, even if there are ten million lawyers in Nigeria, it won’t still be enough because (for the umpteenth time) we do not just service a market of two hundred million persons, we are servicing a global market of over 7 billion persons.
There is even more money in the Nigerian legal market now than it used to be. Now Nigerian lawyers bill in millions of dollars. Nigerian lawyers charge billions of naira as legal fees. It couldn’t be heard of that any lawyer from the early 2000s downwards would be paid a billion naira or a million dollars as legal fees.
The sky is big enough for all of us, Just carve your niche for yourself and excel in your area, that’s all it takes.
Stanley Alieke is an Abuja based legal practitioner.
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Gender equality is a fundamental human right and a key driver of social and economic development. Recognising the importance of promoting gender equality, Plateau State has established the Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission to address gender disparities and promote equal opportunities for all individuals. This essay explores the significance of the GEOC to Plateau State, its journey under Olivia Dazyam’s leadership, perspectives and insights on GEO laws, basic concepts of gender, and the gender situation in Plateau.
Additionally, it extends congratulations to the state governor for the establishment of the commission.
Importance of the Plateau State Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission:
The GEOC plays a pivotal role in advancing gender equality and empowering marginalised groups in Plateau State. By addressing gender-based discrimination and promoting inclusivity, the commission contributes to the overall well-being and development of the state. Through its programs and initiatives, the GEOC aims to create a more equitable society where every individual, regardless of gender, has equal opportunities to thrive.
Journey under Olivia’s Leadership:
Under the leadership of Olivia and her team, many of them pioneers, the GEOC has made significant strides in advancing gender equality and promoting women’s empowerment in its short span of existence. Olivia’s commitment to social justice and gender equality has guided the commission in implementing effective policies and programs to address gender disparities and promote inclusivity. Through strategic partnerships and community engagement, Olivia has raised awareness about gender issues and mobilised support for gender-sensitive initiatives.
Perspectives and Insights on GEO Laws:
GEO laws serve as a framework for promoting gender equality and protecting the rights of women and girls in Plateau State. These laws encompass a wide range of issues, including access to education, healthcare, employment, and political participation. By enforcing GEO laws, the commission aims to eliminate gender-based discrimination and promote gender-sensitive practices across all sectors of society.
However, challenges remain in fully implementing and enforcing these laws, including cultural barriers and inadequate resources.
Gender Situation in Plateau:
Plateau State, like many other regions in Nigeria, faces challenges related to gender inequality. Women and girls often experience discrimination in education, employment, healthcare, and political participation. Gender-based violence, including domestic violence and harmful traditional practices, remains prevalent in the state. Despite these challenges, there are also positive developments, including increasing awareness about gender issues and efforts to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality.
Congratulations to the State Governor:
I extend my heartfelt congratulations to the state governor for the establishment of the Plateau State Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission. By prioritizing gender equality and investing in institutions like the GEOC, the state is taking proactive steps towards building a more equitable and inclusive society for all its residents. Indeed the time is now, and together, we can work towards achieving gender equality and promoting social justice in Plateau State and beyond.
Before I conclude, let me take the risk of mentioning names, more like a roll call of honour. His excellency, former Governor Jang played a pivotal role, and one can say that this is his baby, and the Plateau State House of Assembly, several of them, Gad Peter Shamaki, Nene Dung, Mary Izam, Katdapba Gobum, now late Ladi Madaki, and Suzan Yigo, Fatimah Sulieman, Peter Iorapuu, Justina Ngwobi, Ruth Abwo, Madam Jessica, Sese, Chris, Jummai Madaki, the Nigerian office of the UNWomen, Peter Mancha, and several development partners like WRAPPA, the state ministries of women affairs, and also that of justice and many other names I must have skipped, trust me it was not intentional, it is the risk associated with name calling, but be assured that many of us made this happen, and time will tell. You are all appreciated!
Conclusion:
The Plateau State Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission plays a crucial role in promoting gender equality and empowering marginalised groups in the state. Through its initiatives and programs, the commission contributes to the overall development and well-being of Plateau State. With continued commitment and support, the GEOC can continue to advance gender equality and create a more inclusive society where everyone has equal opportunities to thrive.
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A version of this article was first published in my June 21, 2014 column. It is still relevant today.
The other day I was reflecting on Nigerians’ new favorite pastime: endless griping about the increasingly disabling dysfunction of the country. And I realized that one theme that often stands out when we bewail our present conditions is that we almost always sentimentalize the past.
In other words, many Nigerians find relief from the worries of the present by taking a mental escape to the past.
For instance, when Nigerians bemoan the “indigene/settler” dichotomies in many states of the country, they like to recall, for example, that as far back as 1956, a Fulani man from Sokoto by the name of Malam Umaru Altine was elected the first Mayor of Enugu, the political capital of Eastern Nigeria. His religious and ethnic identity didn’t stand in the way of his election—as it certainly would in contemporary Nigeria.
They also remember that when the late Alhaji Abubakar Rimi was governor of Kano State in the Second Republic, he appointed many non-Kano indigenes, including Christians from the South, as advisers and directors. There are several other examples of inclusiveness from the past that we invoke to deplore the politics of intolerance and exclusivity of the present.
[It should be noted, though, that Vice President Kashim Shettima, as governor of Borno State, blazed a trail in appointing southern Christians as cabinet-level advisers and aides. He appointed a certain Ifeanyi Onwubuya as his Chief Detail. Chief Kester Ogualili was his Special Adviser on Community Relations. One Christopher Godwin Akaba served as his Special Assistant. Babagana Zulum, Shettima’s successor, appears to be continuing with the tradition.
Lagos State governors, including the current one, have also historically been ethnically ecumenical in their choice of gubernatorial aides and advisers. They usually have advisers from representative parts of the country. There are probably other “inclusive” governors like Lagos and Borno governors that I am not aware of. I welcome any information that helps me to expand my knowledge of this.
But, of course, this won’t earn our praise or become a reference point of inclusivity, even if it is only merely tokenistic, because it’s still in the present. It takes the passage of time to valorize gestures like this.]
And when Nigerians bemoan the worsening insecurity in the country, especially in the northeast, they never fail to recall that Borno State, the main theater of Boko Haram’s unceasing carnage, used to be so peaceful that its license-plate slogan is “home of peace.” Now, that slogan reads like a cruel joke.
On almost every imaginable subject—infrastructure, electricity, standard of education, tolerance, security, governance, leadership, etc.—our past has become our refuge from the scourge of our present. About the only area that Nigerians don’t look to the past for inspiration is telecommunication. No one looks back to the days of NITEL with nostalgia even in the face of the crappy GSM services that private telecom operators provide now.
I know of no society that valorizes its past, in even the most trivial indices, with as much wistfulness as Nigeria does. Here in the United States, to give just one example, rather than a sentimental longing for the past, I notice a tendency toward chronocentricity, that is, the notion that the present is superior to anything that preceded it.
For instance, when Americans discuss race relations, they look back at their past with disdain. Even though they are far from achieving racial equality, they all seem to agree that they have come a long way; that every subsequent generation is more racially tolerant and broadminded than the one that anteceded it.
As some Black American leaders have pointed out, the fact that racial incidents like the Trayvon Martin murder case captured the national imagination and became the subject of intense national debate speaks to the unusualness of such cases and indicates how much progress has been made in race relations.
Although Americans also complain about declining standards in education, it isn’t as much a national obsession as it is in Nigeria. In fact, studies now show that young Americans actually read more print (and—obviously—electronic) books than did previous generations.
In many societies, people say things like “this is the 21st century, for God’s sake!” to rail against people who are narrow-minded, who are ensconced in their primordial cocoons, who are opposed to progress. Implicit in this utterance is the idea that the current age is an improvement on the previous ones; that history proceeds in a progressive, not a recursive, direction. Of course, this is not entirely accurate, but it does capture a certain level of confidence about the present—and optimism about the future.
Nigerians don’t have even this illusory luxury. The past is a lot more comforting than the present and is therefore a better template for the future. But why wouldn’t it be? As a nation we seem to be moving from bad to worse in almost every sphere.
At a time when most closed societies are opening up and open societies are becoming even more open, we are becoming more wedded to subnational loyalties than ever before.
And stealing of public money no longer makes headline news unless it’s in millions or billions of US dollars. What is more, we have become so desensitized to death that unless people die in their hundreds, newspaper editors don’t put it on the front page.
Even universities that are called “ivory towers” because of their putative insulation from the reality of everyday life are affected by this national culture of worshiping the past. University teachers look to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to reclaim the idea of the university.
I have never heard or read any Nigerian university teacher brag about improvement in scholarship and pedagogy in the universities in the course of the years.
No future can be envisioned out of this depressingly dark present. That is why we glorify and idealize the past. But a country whose past is better than its present in most indices of human development is in a bigger trouble than it realizes. And, most certainly, a country whose future lies in its past has no future.
But, wait! Are we, perhaps, guilty of a phenomenon that psychologists call “rosy retrospection”? That is, the human tendency to look at the past more positively than the present because it has faded from our active memory.
When I look at the archives of the past that we sentimentalize today, I see the same lamentations of decline and dysfunction that we have become accustomed to. Is it a case of every epoch is the worst until it is succeeded by another— and the passage of time and the frailty of human memory wash off its ugliness?
Bille People in Both Rivers and Adamawa States?
My friend Professor Moses Ochonu called my attention to a status update shared by the sensationally impressive polyglot known as Adedeji Odulesi in which he talked about an ethnolinguistic group called Bille, which he said is found in the “Demsa and Mayobelwa” local government areas of Adamawa State and in the “Degema Local Government Area” of Rivers State.
He said the dialects of the Bille language in Adamawa and Rivers states are still mutually intelligible, i.e., they understand each other in spite of the wide geographic, historical, and cultural separation between them.
“Both claim to be brothers and do visit one another,” he wrote. “The Bille from Adamawa are said to have visited their kith and kin in Rivers in 2001, 2012 and during the installation of their new king.”
If this is true, it’s truly intriguing and thought-provoking because it defies our conventional understanding of language and people. It would serve as another evidence of the labyrinthine complexity of ethnic identities in Nigeria.
After reading of this, I decided to search up “Bille language” and “Bille people.” The results I got were jarring. All the articles I read about the “Bille people” talk of only Rivers State. There is no mention of them in Adamawa State.
On the other hand, articles about the “Bille language” talk about the language in Adamawa State. There is no indication I can find anywhere that the language can also be found in Rivers State.
Yet Odulesi isn’t a flippant person. But is there a Bille person in either Rivers State or Adamawa State who can confirm what Odulesi said about them? I would really appreciate it.
Should this turn out to be true, it would be a chapter in my forthcoming book on collective identity construction in Nigeria. Please share with people who are from these places.
Over the last few months, I have unconsciously transitioned from keyboard diarrhea to mental constipation and have pulled back from social media engagements. I even struggle to write my weekly columns.
It’s precisely because toxic, unthinking, IMF-manufactured, right-wing economic populism has become hegemonic and taken firm roots in Nigeria. Blaming Tinubu for his right-wing economic policies while ignoring the fact that his opponents subscribe to the same policies is the kind of hypocrisy my mental, emotional, or ideological constitution is incapable of tolerating.
Right-wing or conservative economic populism manifests differently in different countries, but its core lies in weaponizing the general population's concerns and frustrations, particularly around economic issues, to advocate poisonous, anti-people, market-centric, neoliberal economic policies while blaming an invisible elite or establishment class that supposedly controls power and resources to the detriment of the majority.
In Nigeria, conservative economic populism consists of the intentionally deceitful and absurd but nonetheless successful (at least for now) demonization of subsidies, especially petrol subsidies.
Nigeria’s elite-created economic woes are fraudulently attributed to the dispensation of subsidies. The masses of unsuspecting chumps in the country are then whipped into a senseless frenzy about an invisible, unidentified class of “subsidy thieves” who putatively suck up our commonwealth through petrol subsidies and who would wither and perish when subsidies are removed.
That’s classic right-wing economic populism. Well, experience is showing that it’s actually the masses that are withering and perishing after petrol subsidies have been removed. An acquittance who passionately opposed my recommendation to Tinubu to not remove petrol subsidies in my April 29, 2023, column by regurgitating the banal talking points of hard-hearted neoliberal hawks reached out to me a few days ago to admit that he was a gormless fool to believe the propaganda that petrol subsidies didn’t benefit the masses.
It took the collapse of his small transportation business and the descent of his previously thriving relatives into the dark depths of despair and poverty in less than one year after the removal of petrol subsidies for him to come to the realization that citizens of every country need subsidies.
Another central plank of Nigerian right-wing economic populism is the advocacy for the devaluation of the naira. It’s also known by the fancy name of “floating the naira.” The idea that the naira is “over-valued” and should be allowed to find its true worth in the crucible of demand and supply is a standard arsenal in the rhetorical armory of conservative economic populists in Nigeria.
Yet another favorite shtick of the treacherous tribe of neoliberal vampires in Nigeria is to capitalize on the well-known inefficiency of civil service bureaucracies to advocate the privatization of everything and the mass retrenchment of workers.
Yet these are really old, discredited Structural Adjustment Program policies that the IMF and the World Bank imposed on developing countries, which devastated national economies, caused the untimely deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, which the IMF was compelled to slyly apologize for amid mounting evidence of their tragic failure.
The same rotten and venomous policies have been repackaged, aromatized, and re-presented to developing countries as new and effective elixirs. Every developing country that has embraced them is now coping with potentially explosive internal turmoil.
Like Nigeria, Egypt recently accepted to devalue its currency by more than 68 percent and remove subsidies that lighten the burden of existence for ordinary folks in exchange for an $8 billion loan from the IMF.
Everyone within striking distance of becoming president in Nigeria in 2023 subscribed—and still subscribes—to the consensus that the IMF and the World Bank are inviolable economic oracles that must not be disobeyed, that subsidies must be eliminated and the poor be left to fend for themselves, and that the market is supreme and should be left to determine the value of everything.
In fact, the other day, PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar put out a press statement titled “Argentina’s Javier Milei approach to reforms should serve as a lesson for Tinubu” where he extolled the dangerously right-wing Argentinian president Javier Milei whose rightwing economic populist policies are destroying the fabric of his country.
“I read a recent report in Reuters titled: ‘Argentina’s market double down on Milei as investors ‘start to believe’,” he wrote.
Well, the same Western financial establishment is already praising the outcome of Tinubu’s economic policies. A March 8, 2024, report from Bloomberg, for instance, has said that “Foreign investor demand for Nigerian assets surges as reforms instituted by President Bola Tinubu’s administration starts paying off.”
Similarly, one David Roberts, identified as a former British Council Director in Abuja, bragged the other day that Nigeria’s economy “posted a GDP growth of 3.46% in quarter 4” as a result of Tinubu’s economic reforms.
He wrote: “Why would a country with a severe infrastructural deficit invest more money on a wasteful expenditure such as cheap petrol, instead of building schools, hospitals, dams and a national railway system? It is evident that it had to go.
“We joined the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in saying as much to the Nigerian government. And at long last, it is gone.”
People outside Nigeria reading about Nigeria in the Western financial press would think Nigerians are now living in El- Dorado as a result of Tinubu’s “reforms”—just like Atiku thinks a favorable Reuters story about the anti-people economic policies of Milei, who is called the “Madman of Argentina,” is already yielding excellent outcomes.
If you do the bidding of the Western establishment, they will always make up statistics to show that your economy has grown. I called attention to this in my June 28, 2023, column titled, “Why Tinubu’s Hiring and Firing Frenzy Excites Nigerians.”
I wrote: “What shall it profit a country when it pursues policies that cause the economy to ‘grow’ but cause the people to growl? After the economy has ‘grown’ but the people still groan, where is the growth? The most important growth isn't the rise in abstract, disembodied, World Bank/IMF-created metrics but in the improvement of the quality of life of everyday folks.”
Milei’s Argentina that Atiku is praising is almost in the same right-wing economic hellscape as Nigeria is. Like Tinubu, Milei began his presidency by removing subsidies for petrol and transportation and devaluing the Argentinian peso by more than 50 percent. In addition, he threw scores of workers into unemployment when he reduced the number of ministries in the country.
He is so market-centric he scrapped a whole host of rules designed to reign in the greed and exploitation of private enterprises. He did this by getting the parliament to approve the principle of "delegated powers" to the executive for one year, which allows him to rule by decree like a military dictator in the name of "economic urgency."
The result? Like in Nigeria, most Argentinians are having a hard time finding food to eat. A February 1, 2024, CNN story captures it: “‘I don’t know how I will eat.’ For the workers behind Argentina’s national drink, Milei’s reforms are turning sour.”
Argentinian workers periodically go on strike to protest Milei’s punishing right-wing policies. On February 28, all flights were cancelled in the country because air travel workers went on a crippling 24-hour strike.
A March 4, 2024, Bloomberg report said Milei’s policies had caused spending to plunge at shops in Argentina, that firms were seeing double-digit sales declines for third straight month, that the worth of salaries had plummeted amid a paralyzing 250% inflation, and that recession was deepening in the country.
The lead to the story says it all: “Consumers in Argentine are running out of options to shield themselves from runaway price increases as President Javier Milei’s austerity measures send the country deeper into recession.”
That’s Atiku’s exemplar for Nigeria. Peter Obi is, of course, no different. Tinubu, Atiku, Obi, and in fact Yemi Osinbajo are united in their love for rightwing economics, which invariably leads to an increase in poverty, suffocation of workers, rolling back of welfare for common people, etc.
In a perverse way, they are actually worse than Buhari because they are self-conscious conservative economic ideologues. Buhari is merely a know-nothing, bungling, kakistocratic power monger.
The real tragedy is that the vast majority of Nigerians who are ensconced in the narrow ethno-religious political silos built around the personalities of the major 2023 presidential candidates don’t realize that on economic policies, which is what really matters, Tinubu, Atiku, Obi, and Osinbajo are more alike than unlike.
Sadly, Nigerian leftists, who used to be the bulwark against the dangers of conservative economic totalitarianism, have either been coopted or silenced. Only Femi Falana, Majeed Dahiru, I, and a few others consistently stand up to the forces of economic conservatism.
This state of affairs will ensure that Tinubu’s successor will be another neoliberal ideologue who will bludgeon his way to the presidency using religion and ethnicity as cudgels. When he deepens the misery he inherits, he will blame his predecessor for not being a faithful practitioner of the neoliberal gospel. His own successor will replicate his template.
After three terms of this right-wing baloney, Nigeria will be irretrievably gone. The time to pivot from the IMF and the World Bank and to reject everyone who is their poodle is now.
As military Governor of Lagos State in the 90s, he introduced Operation Sweep. This was a special anti-crime outfit, with incredible rapid response capabilities. Suddenly, crime rates dropped precipitously in places like Mushin, Maroko and those far-flung parts of the state which were generally looked upon as no-man’s-land; in terms of guaranteed security. Yes, Lagos became unsettlingly calm. After-dark criminality suffered a major setback. The criminals fled, mostly to neighboring Ogun State. This prompted the Military Administrator of the besieged state to inaugurate Operation Wedge, a few months after the emergence of Operation Sweep.
So, as Marwa swept them out of lagos, Ogun wedged then for ultimate extermination. Thereafter, all other Military Administrators latched onto the idea and set up various security outfits. But most of them lacked the rigour, professional efficiency and real-time response profile of Marwa’s Operation Sweep.
Then, The Guardian newspaper set up a 13-man interview team, one of the largest interview teams I had ever seen or heard about, to meet with Marwa and discuss governance and other political issues. To my surprise, my name was on the list of interviewees. This was most unusual, because I was on the Newspaper’s Editorial Board; members of which were usually not part of Newsroom activities. So, off we went to the Governor’s office on the appointed date.
It was a full harvest. The questions kept coming. The Governor kept answering. The exactness of his answers, his general articulation and pointed grasp of issues of leadership and strategic engagement stood out so clearly. Then I asked: “What is the explanation for the very conspicuous decline in petty crimes, and general criminality, since you became governor? Is it indicative of an improvement in the level of living, or is there some special method you deployed to bring about what we are seeing today?”
He managed his usual dimpled smile and said, matter of factly and almost casually, “I simply studied the crime demographics and did the needful”. That was not enough explanation, and I told him so. He needed to tell the public exactly what he was doing.
Then Marwa explained how and why a leader must use security reports to guide himself in the management of state security. “Remember that I was a military officer attached to one of Nigeria’s Foreign Missions. I looked at the New York City Model and that is what I have applied here, with some modifications suited to our environment”. He went further to explain that he met areas, like Ikoyi, with low crime rate having far more police presence and patrol than the very densely populated parts of the state. Why, for instance, would Ikoyi have four patrol teams while Mushin, with 20 times the population of Ikoyi, having just one patrol team? He asked rhetorically.
“There must be a method, and even a science, to every serious engagement, if you want to make the right impact and achieve meaningful and lasting results. I can tell you this with absolute certainly: Any governor coming after me who applies this same template will achieve exactly the same commendable results”. He rounded it off by saying that the best approach to any job is to first find out how best to do it, before you start. And, it is a matter of record that he was one hell of a good governor while in Lagos.
Is he bringing more or less the same approach, paradigms, effectiveness and attitude to his current watch as the Chairman of the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA)? I believe that the answer is a resounding yes!
All the arrests and seizures of illegal drug consignments and sundry successes of Marwa’s NDLEA have been very heavy on preemptive intelligence work. There is also overwhelming evidence of thorough going demographic analysis. Within this you find, also, the conscious mapping of drug production, transportation, distribution and consumption patterns. Marwa’s NDLEA is one of the few examples of an organization that is paying deliberate scientific attention to the physical and human geography of drug-related issues today.
There seems to be, in all of this, a structured collaboration with the internation anti-drug network, with focus on predictive, and predictable drug-related activities.
Last week, Brig. Gen. Buba Marwa (rtd) said that drug abuse among Nigerians was one of the main drivers of insecurity in the country. This was during the sensitization and advocacy programme for women and youths in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in Abuja. The programme was a collaborative engagement with Dr Aminu Gusau, organized under the platform of WADA. Marwa’s stated concern at the event was the growing involvement of women and youths in drug abuse.
This unfortunate development has taken absolutely incomprehensible dimensions in the country, across all the six geopolitical zones. It is also no longer an urban phenomenon, or problem. Many rural communities are now bedeviled by the malaise. As Marwa pointed out, the problem of drug abuse among the youth has now become everyone’s problem. It required everyone’s effort to deal with, and eliminate, it. All parents, schools, religious leaders, the general public, and the youths themselves must rise to the occasion.
One of the essential takeaways from Marwa at the aforementioned event is his observation that the youths constitute the engine room of every society, which must be in the right shape mentally and physically to drive a better future. But that will not happen if they are damaged by psychotropic drugs. This is a universal problem of humanity, irrespective of tradition, culture, and religion.
Listen to Marwa: “The youths exhibit attitudes both for the development of society and, at the same time, for the creation of problems in society. Drug abuse leads to criminal offences, and this fuels insecurity, such as armed robbery, murder, kidnapping, and banditry, among others. This also leads to burglary and sex work. Evidence shows that young people use drugs for various reasons, which include relaxation, experimental/curiosity, and enhancing performance, among others”. These are brute, incontrovertible, facts of our daily experience, as Nigerians.
“Go all out for drug barons and cartels”, was Marwa’s charge to NDLEA commanders, when he set targets for Commanding Officers in his 2024 Tasking Orders. As he was telling Zonal Commanders, State Commanders and Area Commanders of the Agency to go all out and smoke out drug barons still in hiding, he was also telling them to dismantle their cartels. The dismantling of the cartels, distribution networks and other facilitating variables, as part of ongoing efforts to totally cut off illegal drug supply generally, and especially to persons involved in criminal activities across the country, will make visible impact on local and national security.
Marwa is probably one of the few heads of government agencies in Nigeria today who can say with justification: “Within the limit of our resources, we have been able to push boundaries. The statistics of our operations, empirical facts from the field, the general anti-illicit drug climate we have built and the rapport between us and our domestic and international partners, all speak volumes about how we are faring, especially against the backdrop of where we are coming from, of what the situation used to be a few years ago”. Go and verify, as Peter Obi would say.
And Marwa also operates with more than a fair doze of realism, while on the job. Hear him, again: “Commendations apart, we also cannot afford not to tell ourselves the plain truth; we still have a long way to go. Hence commanders, officers and men of NDLEA can’t afford to rest on their oars. Yes, we have kept the flag of performance flying, but there’s still room for improvement. There is still much to do. And we cannot afford to be complacent now, as we have committed to a lot of ongoing efforts to improve our operational capabilities”.
He also spoke of how the Agency is constantly engaging stakeholders within and outside the country, to support and help optimize its capabilities. “We need to remind ourselves that to achieve our mandate, professionalism and discipline must be maintained at all times and in all our operations”, he never stops saying.
The NDLEA, under Marwa, is working with all relevant state authorities, and available supportive channels, for improved funding and greater impact. With improved funding, the Agency will deal more comprehensively and holistically effective, as an essential part of the “solutions toolkit’ for dealing with an aspect of the security challenges facing the nation today. If the NDLEA can effectively undermine drug availability, and also cut off the access for drug delivery routes and channels for criminals and the vulnerable, there will be a substantial, and measurable, gain in social stability. The will also be a decline in youth restiveness and general insecurity.
In this regard, it is important that the Agency gets improved funding, which should be seen as a very important investment in an overlooked aspect of the much-vaunted non-kinetic approaches to guaranteeing national security. This is a matter the President should take seriously, and personal; especially bearing in mind the youth crisis in Olowogbowo, and some other parts of Lagos.
If, as Marwa said to his Commanders: “This year, we want to raise the bar of our performance and this calls for commanders who are up to the task to be up and doing on the job”, it means that the NDLEA should be helped to “… clean our streets and communities of illicit substances”. The matter is made more urgent by the fact that, as the NDLEA boss said: “… recently, there is another demand by kidnappers and bandits aside money, which is drugs. In that sense, it means NDLEA is working because they don’t ask for it before, meaning that they’re no longer as available as they used to be and the prices of those available have gone beyond their reach.”
Lest we forget, there is a direct connection between joblessness, poverty, school closures, drugs and criminality. But this does not take away from the need to deal with whatever is under our control. In the instant case, it is the menace of illicit and harmful drugs. That is Buba Marwa’s call, and plea. He needs everyone’s support in this fight.
I celebrate you,a living legend and uncommon African icon, Chief (Dr) Olusegun Mathew Okikiola Obasanjo ( OBJ), on your 87th birthday, which took place on March 5,2024.On paper, you are 87,having been bornbon on March 5,1937. But, you have maintained to me and all who cared to listen, again and again, that your age was merely an assumed approximation on paper, because some of your classmates have already died or celebrated their 90th,92nd and 93rd birthdays. I believe the latter more, for it comes straight from the horse's mouth. For example, one of your classmates, Dr Onaolapa Soleye ( born 11th November, 1933),who was former Minister of Finance,just died four days after he turned 90 years. He ha only just been buried.Whatever be the case, whether you are an octogenarian ( in your 80s), or nonagenarian ( in your 90s), no one can dispute your imperishable contributions to the development of the Nigerian nation in particular and the African continent in general. This is why, even as you have lovers and traducers across the world (because of your "My Command",which is "Not (your)My Will"), no one can ignore you and your looming presence. Like the stubborn scar, you have refused to go away. You always leave your marks even after the healing of the sore. So, hate him or love him, you, OBJ, have become a recurring decimal in our national discourse and conversation. You easily stir the hornet's nest with effortless éclat. When you speak, you generate national uproar. You write fiercely,fearlessly and ceaselessly. You still wield your mighty pen in a more menacing and devastating manner than you once wielded the gun when you took over control of the 3rd Marine Commando from Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle during the better-forgotten three years bloody fratricidal Civil War in Nigeria. You had also accepted the mantle of surrender on behalf of Nigeria from General Phillip Effiong who did so on behalf of Biafra at Dodan Barracks, Lagos.This was on 15th January, 1970 (Armed Forces Day),though you told me this was a mere formality as the handover agreement had already earlier been signed some days earlier. For these historic acts, your name had already entered our history books. And for many more positive reasons too.
When you write your usual probing and inquiring letters (an art and pastime for which you have since become accustomed and famous), you cause national ruckus. You ruffle feathers, bruise toes and figuratively draw blood. But, those sitting leaders or rulers that ignored your message in those piercing, intellectually-grounded letters that drip with rare vision and wisdom in their full length, breadth and erudition, and preferred to go for the messenger, rather than the message, had always done so at their own peril.
You were first arrested on the orders of then military dictator, General Sani Abacha on March 13,1995, over a phantom coup attempt. You were initially released on the intervention of ex American President, Jimmy Carter; and again re-arrested in the night of June 13,1995,and taken to an unknown destination. You were tried in company of your military Deputy Head of State, Major General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, Col Lawan Gwadabe and Chris Anyanwu, a magazine publisher. You were initially sentenced to death after the phantom coup trials before another panel set up by Abacha reduced the sentence to 3p years, and again to 15 years imprisonment.we in the human rights community picked up the gauntlet, marched, protested and rallied daily on the streets of Lagos and elsewhere. We forced the then military junta led by Gen. Sani Abacha to commute your death sentence to mere imprisonment.You were still serving in Yola Prisons when Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar ordered your release.Yar'Adua was not so lucky. He died at Abakaliki prison where he was serving on 8th December, 1997.Little did we, or you ever know, that z a child of destiny and like the phoenix, you would rise once again from your ashes and become President of Nigeria between 1999 and 2007. This was after you had emerged Head of State (1976-1979), succeeding then Head of State, General Muritala Mohammed, who was mindlessly slain during the Col Buka Suka Dimka-led military coup on 13th February,1976. Make no mistake about this sir, I was also one of the leading lights who valiantly led the fiery battle of opposition against your third term agenda bid. I had wondered then why you desired to.I spoke piercingly against it at the Niger State Government Lodge where we had gathered to puncture your perceived inordinate ambition for self transmutation and succession. I believe in retrospect now, you would also have been wondering what you had indeed forgotten in Aso Villa that you were going back for, having already etched your name in the sands of time and got elevated into the pantheon of Nigerian heroes in less than 70 years on mother earth.
Two years ago sir, you greatly honoured me by singing my happy birthday song and cutting my birthday cake, assisted by another living nonagenarian legend and quality University education Czar, Aare Afe Babalola, SAN, CON, LL.D, at the Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti ( ABUAD). This was after I had delivered the 10th convocation lecture of this arguably numero uno African University and one of the very 400 leading Universities in the world. I am, very proudly, a Visiting Professor of Law at this great University that just made one of the best results (over 16 First Class and about 69 Second Class Upper Division) at the Nigerian Law School. I was grearly humbled because I had,as a little boy in the sixties,heard about your war time exploits whenever we gathered around a little transistor radio. I was then in St Mary's Primary School in my then little rustic village of Iviukwe, near Agenebode in Etsako East Local Government Area of Edo State.
Remain who, whom and what you are sir. Don't ever change, for you are far too old now to change and learn how to become left-handed. Remain OBJ.Continue to play football as you do always. Continue to enjoy another passion of yours- singing and dancing- (even if your vocals fall far short of Nightingale’s, and your shuffles not Michael Jackson's). Continue to do more research and write more books and letters. You have just written a new book titled, "The Art of Leading: Unconventional Wisdom from Biblical Leaders ".
Before this, you had already written tons of books, including the following,perhaps more than any living African leader ever did: My Watch (Vols. 1-3, which is your memoir); Not My Will; Call to Duty; A March of Progress: Collected Speeches of His Excellency Lt. General Olusegun Obansanjo; Forging a Compact IN U.S.-African Relations; Nigeria and International Trade Address; The Head of State’s Broadcast to the Nation, Wednesday, 29th March, 1978, Embodying the Land Use Decree No.6 of 1978; Nzeogwu: An Intimate Portrait of Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu; Women of Virtue: Stories of Outstanding Women in the Bible; My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967 – 1970; Guides to Effective Prayer; The Leadership Challenge of Economic Reforms in Africa; Africa in Perspective: Myths and Realities (The Russell C. Leffingwell Lectures); Africa Embattled: Selected Essays on Contemporary African Development; A New Dawn: A Collection of Speeches of President Olusegun Obasanjo; Hope for Africa: Selected Speeches of Olusegun Obasanjo; The Challenges of Agricultural Production and Food Security in Africa; Work of Earth; Democracy Works: Turning Politics to Africa’s Advantage; Making Africa Work; This Animal Called Man; Addressing Africa’s Youth Employment and Food Security Crisis: The Role of African Agriculture in Job Creation; Constitution for National Integration and Development; Women of Virtue; Africa Through the Eyes of a Patriot; Before It Is Too Late...and the Reactions that Followed; Years of Reconstruction: Selected Foreign Policy Speeches of Olusegun Obasanjo; I See Hope; Hope For Africa; Sermons From Prison; Standing Tall: Selected Speeches of Olusegun Obasanjo; Management in Agriculture and Rural Development: A Practitioner’s View; The Asian Aspiration: Why and How Africa Should Emulate Asia—and What it Should Avoid; Before I Die; Africa, Rise to Challenge: Towards a Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) and more. So,write, write and write. Don't stop. After all, you didn't go back to the University after your presidency in 2007 to bag a Ph.D by thesis for the fun of it. So,you have sharing your thoughts on many issues. Don't stop now.
We are not tired of reading you. We are hungry for more. Remain consistently consistent, blunt and unapologetic about it. Make no mistakes, some surely hate you for this. But, more adore you for it. I am one of them. Because, the truth, especially naked truth, is always very bitter. But truth is about conscience. Like Uthman Dan Fodio once declared, 'Conscience is an open wound; only the truth can heal it". This is why the Holy Bible tells us, "...and thou shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32).
Baba, continue to ask the right questions. And where possible, go ahead and question the answers also.
Don't ever drop your humour that makes standup comedians green with envy. Enjoy peace that passeth all understanding (Philippians 4:7). Above all sir, don't die yet. Don't even think about it. Shun death and its monstrous visage with all your heart and soul. Mock it. Grab and hold on to Gen 6:3 (120 years on earth). Nigeria, Africa and indeed the black world still need you and your gargantuan services and contributions.
Happy birthday sir, and many happy returns of the day.
It is well you you, baba. In all, please, OBJ, remain OBJ.
