It Smells Like Christmas But Not in Chibok

“Wow! It smells like Christmas.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that this season reminds me of Christmas.”

“But it is Christmas.”

“Really?”

“Yea man, there’s Christmas in the air, that’s what you are smelling.”

“I see.”

“You are smelling the dry weather and dusty roads. You know what I always say about this season?”

“What’s that?”

“‘O, what fun it is to throw banger on a dusty harmattan night’.”

“Well…”

“Well what? Be merry man, be merry. This is December for crying out loud.”

“Oh, stop that your ‘crying out loud’ nonsense.”

“What’s eating you bro?”

“‘Crying out loud, crying out loud’, some people have been crying out loud for about 260 days now and nobody gives a damn about their cries.”

“Who? For wia be dat?”

“Please, please, please get serious man. Everywhere across the land. And have you never heard of Chibok girls?”

“Oh, that? I never knew you were part of the #BringBackOurGirls…”

“Oh shut up man! That’s usually the problem with some of you in this country.#BringBackOurGirls is not an association or club, it’s a movement. And I don’t have to be from Chibok to identify with the girls.”

“I know, Bro. Just that sometimes, we are too preoccupied with so many different issues in this country that we tend to forget about the Chibok girls.”

“Truly, I don’t know what this country is doing to rescue the girls, assuming they are all still alive and safe at all.”

“I pray they are. God will not let any harm come upon them.”

“So typical…you just mentioned God now, right? God has endowed us with common sense to act.”

“I guess we are trying.”

“‘Trying’? That’s what we ever do and nothing but try.”

“What would you rather we did then?”

“Results…that’s all we want. The world is not interested in excuses but in results.”

“Hmm…”

“Truly, I don’t know how our government officials sleep soundly every night since the girls were abducted. It must be either their conscience is in slumber or outright dead.”

“I think I get your point there.”

“I wonder what Chibok is like this very moment.”

“I can’t imagine it myself.”

“There would be dust in the air no doubt, maybe cold nights too but the setting must be eerie and funereal. For them, the smell in the air would not evoke Christmas or love. It would be the continued reminder of the forced absence of their sources of joy, the very girls who last year sang carols in the town are still unaccounted for. So, how would they know it’s Christmas?”

“Sad, very sad, Bro. It’s a shame!”

“And it’s not only the Chibok community. This Christmas-lessness affects many others who suffered preventable losses during the year. All the people bombed to death across the country through acts of insurgence yet nobody is made to account. And what about the scores of young people killed in the Abba Moro supervised-Nigeria Immigration Service job recruitment scam?”

“I almost forgot that too. And the minister and other officials in that ministry are going to celebrate elaborately this Christmas.”

“I can bet you; hampers, rice, chicken etc have been exchanged several times by all these inept officials to celebrate their year of grand failure. And they do so because they don’t give a damn.”

http://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=166404

http://www.punchng.com/opinion/its-christmas-but-not-in-chibok/

Is the oil party over yet?

Back in the 1970s, in the height of our oil boom, our then Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, was alleged to have boasted that Nigeria’s problem was not how to make money but how to spend it. That was a perfect description of how giddy we strode with swagger as an oil-rich country. Soon, our appetite for consuming what we needed and what we didn’t need became our hallmark. We abandoned agriculture and settled for the new deal in town: oil. Or maybe we should say here that we were intoxicated by the substance.

Truth be told, oil did us well, especially in the famed days of oil boom before the oil doom. We built several infrastructure across the land – roads, railways, schools, hospitals, airports, seaports, stadia etc. We hosted several international events and competitions and established our voice internationally as an authentic African voice. Oh, and we played the big brother to many other countries, even picking up some of their mundane bills like salaries. Who never knew of Nigeria? Well, those who lived in outer space maybe.

Yet it seemed that the oil was also our undoing. Apart from driving up our tastes to a point of inordinacy, it made us lazy about other sources of income generation such as agriculture, tourism and even tax collection. Why bother about any ‘hard work’ when we had the substance which turned to wealth, almost instantaneously. The interesting part was that we didn’t need to know the process of harvesting the substance from the soil. Those who needed it more than us were willing to come and apply their ingenuity to drill it out, tell us how much they had drilled and pay us what we agreed on. Many said the process allowed us to be cheated by the ‘driller-marketer’ which our technologically-advanced partners are. But we never bother because in this romance called ‘joint venture’ we are in; we the rent-collectors are guaranteed our rents, no matter the quantum.

The very rent gave us smart toys, squeaky clean designer clothes and perfumes that attracted friends and foes alike to recognise our place in the firmament of oil-rich countries. But then, it also created our club of local oil sheikhs and our nouveaux riche who became the new overlords over fellow citizens who were banished to a life of poverty, to eat from the hands of the oily men and women. The latter’s only ‘pedigree’ was usually connection to state power. And the state? That became synonymous with waste and ineptitude.

The state played yoyo with the oil. And because we still rely largely on imports of the refined products (petrol etc) of what we sell in raw form (crude oil), the cost of the refined product stayed high whenever the international oil price was high. And when the oil price dips, we still suffer because, being an oil-producer, it means our income flow is reduced, with attendant negative effect on the ordinary citizens. In a sense, therefore, it is, ‘heads they (government) win, tails we (the citizens) lose’. Such hanky-panky by government always brought out the anger in the people with some praying that they wished the country never had the magic substance after all.

Every run comes to an end after all. And so many of us saw this coming, while many pretended it would never happen. Even now that it has happened upon us, many have still not heard or have refused to hear. But as the saying goes, if it feels like it, it probably is. The party is over, or isn’t it? The party of swimming in the ocean of oil money (read ‘oyel money’, for good effect). In the last few weeks, our petrodollars have refused to come tumbling in as we often assume and expect. We need to wake up and smell the coffee, or is it the stench of burnt oil? Whatever it is, we are in trouble and the earlier the country and its citizens realised that, the better.

We need to not only diversify our economy to bring in more money from the abundance of sources, but perhaps, more importantly, we need to curb our penchant for excessive consumption and wastage at the personal and corporate levels. Many of us have campaigned for smaller government in terms of the number of political offices. The time to implement that is now. It is equally important to cut the official and unofficial perks of such offices, including the costs for running illegal offices such as those of first ladies or wives of government officials at any level. We need to tell ourselves the hard truth that the oil party is over!

- See more at: http://www.thenicheng.com/oil-party-yet/#sthash.qYDqy8L5.dpuf

GEJ v GMB rematch 2015

As you read this, we have just 62 days to the February 14 general election in Nigeria. Once again, the election will square up incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) against General Muhammadu Buhari (GMB). This much emerged last Wednesday and Thursday at the national conventions of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). Both men were the top finishers in the 2011 elections, a contest which left in its aftermath, sorrow, death and blood, following days of post-election violence across the land. Should the planned rematch raise worries?

The worries stem from the post-2011 election incidents. This is because both men have been anything but friendly towards each other, post-2011. There have been overt and subtle allegations of either promoting violence or incompetence in handling incidents of violence. Even if both men do not openly deride each other, their followers and supporters tend to exacerbate the gulf between. The effect of this on the political space has been enormous.

Interestingly, the processes that threw both men up as candidates in 2011 seem to have played out again this year, but in a reverse manner. In 2011, President Jonathan fought for a presidential election ticket from his party against formidable oppositions and still got through. Buhari on the other hand got the ticket of his then party, Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), on a platter, even as he ‘owned’ that party.

Today, conversely, Jonathan got the PDP ticket with little stress, even as the party blatantly refused to allow other interested party members a fair chance to give it a shot. The signpost of what a party’s internal democracy should be was on Wednesday and Thursday when the APC held what could be described as the best party primary in recent times. Interestingly, the main legacy parties that formed APC – namely the ANPP, CPC and the ACN, including its progenitor, Alliance for Democracy (AD) – had reputations for non-democratic decision-making. They were in the habit of pressuring aspirants to abandon their ambitions and allow the preferred candidate of the ruling class to prevail. All that became history last week. All the five aspirants in the APC stood election and wooed about 7,000 delegates with Buhari emerging the clear winner.

As both men go into the race, one hopes they would focus on the real issues besetting the country such as corruption, the collapsing economy, insurgency, poor state of roads and other infrastructure and provision of social services such as health and education. Just as the country begins to groan under the effect of austerity, we want to know how the aspirants plan to get us out of this economic mess through sound policies which must necessarily include cutting down frivolous costs associated with governance.

And while they consider the above, we should remind them to cut off the sophistry and tell us their real blueprints for addressing those issues. We should remind both men and their managers not to further divide the country into the fragments of ethno-religious identities. Those identities, after all, do not define honesty, integrity, competence and commitments. They only appeal to our base instincts which are not sustainable. As the Chinese saying goes, ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice’.

It is time for GEJ and GMB to commit to issues-based campaign and rein in their supporters from doing anything that could lead to violence before, during and after the elections. And for the blind supporters out there who see the elections as ‘do-or-die’, we should also remind them that we have a country to protect and defend. After all, if we lose our country after the general elections, it would not matter who won the elections.

http://www.thenicheng.com/gej-v-gmb-rematch-2015/ 

The big man and his entourage

After my initial fits and starts attempt at reading Michaela Wrong’s book, It’s Our Time to Eat, I have recently got into the groove of it. The book tells the story of John Kithongo, a principled activist who was hired by the Kenyan government to head its anti-corruption agency, the Kenyan Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC).

Kithongo’s story reflects much of what we see across Africa. It tells the story of the multi-facetted nature of corruption in seeping through the building blocks of society. There are several lessons to learn from the book. One is that the fight against corruption is herculean and the commitment of governments often suspect. Page after page, I keep seeing Nigeria’s local context in Wrong’s book. Just take a look at the following quote, for instance:

“Reporting Africa, I’ve always been puzzled by the readiness otherwise intelligent diplomats, businessmen and technocrats show in embracing the ‘Blame the Entourage’ line of argument. The Old Man himself is OK’ runs this refrain echoed at various times from Guinea to Cote d’Ivoire, Zaire to Gabon, Tanzania to Zambia. 
“Deeply principled, a devout Muslim/Protestant/Catholic, he observes, in his own life, a strict moral code. It’s his aides/wife/sons who are the problem. They’re like leeches. If only he’d realise what they are doing in his name and put a stop to it. But of course he adores them. It’s his one weakness. Such a shame.”

The argument has always struck me as a form of naivety so extreme it verges on intellectual dishonesty. In countries where presidents have done their best to centralise power, altering constitutions, winning over the army and emasculating the judiciary, the notion that key decisions can be taken without their approval is laughable. If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it’s because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat’s own proclivities.”

How convenient it is for people to avoid talking truth to power but flip-flop to blame the excesses and, yes, corruption of such leaders on their entourage. We hear that a lot in Nigeria at different levels. The apologists of the incumbents ascribe every achievement recorded on such officials, yet for every failure, they find a way of blaming it on their aides. And truth is, our government officials are often very smart and smooth enough in their corruption as to claim ignorance of what is going on under them. That explains why every leader is often described as having ‘tried his/her best’.

That also explains why, whenever someone is ever jailed for corruption and abuse, it is never the top dog but at best, many of the numerous aides. The exception to this was the conviction of former Delta State governor, James Ibori. But then, such conviction was only achieved outside Nigeria after years of legal rigmarole at home.

For those who try to extricate the chief executives from the actions of their subordinates, they forget that the chief executive, in a winner-takes-all political system as ours, hires and fires his aides, not the other way. As such, the buck, as they say, stops at the big man’s table because he made the choices. They should take full responsibilities for the team’s excesses, just as they do with the successes.

So, where the police boss goofs, the president should take the can if he fails to call him to order. When a minister misappropriates funds, the president should not claim ignorance. And when a commissioner is found out to be living under the shadows of a forged certificate or fraudulent academic claims and still retains his exalted office two years after, it stops being just his problem, but a big question mark on the integrity of his boss, the governor.

Perhaps our problem flows from the workings of our traditional societies where the king can do no wrong or is at best excused of his excesses. But then, we operate a different political system in the name of presidential democracy where the standards are different. So, let our big men take responsibility for themselves and the actions of their entourage.

See more at: http://www.thenicheng.com/big-man-entourage/#sthash.lfXpMP9k.dpuf

Austerity? Cut governance cost

So, now, it is confirmed that we are officially in ‘austerity’. The last time we had that was sometime in 1982 under the Shehu Shagari administration. A few weeks ago, Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, announced stiffer economic policies following dwindling prices of oil, the country’s mega bucks spinner. Although she avoided referring to it as austerity, the indicators are all too obvious. These include the devaluation of the national currency (the naira), increase in lending rates and higher taxes on certain luxury goods. That our economy was not on solid ground has always been known and appreciated by many Nigerians, even when the government kept pretending. The good thing is that our government has now accepted the reality and has shown interest in confronting the challenge.

  

While not claiming to be a better expert on the economy than the finance minister who also goes by the superfluous title of ‘Coordinating Minister for the Economy’, I have a few suggestions on how to manage our economy better than we do currently. While the focus would be mainly on the federal government, the issues apply equally, if not more, with state and even local governments.

  

One major step to take is to cut down on the cost of governance. The starting point is the number of cabinet members in the government. Averagely, we find a crowd of 40 or more cabinet ministers. I appreciate that the constitution requires the president to appoint as many ministers as there are states in Nigeria. That translates to at least 36, or 37 if we treat the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, as a state. Until that provision of the constitution is changed, could we at least ask the president to be prudent as to limit his ministers’ list to 37?

  

It is also important to prune the number of the president’s aides. In June 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan sought and obtained the approval of Senate to appoint 20 advisers, but at a particular time and in apparent breach of the number of aides approved for him, he had at least 24. Notice that some of these adviser positions are irrelevant and superfluous to exist with ministers and ministers of state for related areas of government. Added to this is the fact that these motley crowd of ministers and advisers carry along their own list of advisers and assistants, complete with salaries, allowances and other perks of office, thus further bloating up the cost of governance.

  

Yet another contentious addition to the cost of governance are the huge costs run up in the name of governance by the wife of the president and wives of state governors and even wives of local government councils chairmen. Those positions, not recognised by the constitution, have since been illegally elevated to offices for spending public funds which are hardly accounted for.

  

Another waste point in public expenditure that needs to be addressed is the number of aircraft in the presidential fleet. It seems we end up buying a new aircraft every other year such that, at the last count, we had about 10 aircraft in the presidential fleet. This is scandalous for a country that has no official airline. Pray, what do we need all that number of aircraft for, given the high cost of maintenance?

  

Even more nauseating in the list of wastages in governance is the fact that every government – federal, state and local – criminally subsidises the political party in power at each level. This they do through several ways, including hosting of political party meetings in government houses, using public funds to foot the costs of meals, even when they do not pay for the cost of venues. In other instances, government officials use public funds to attend purely partisan functions that have no bearing on their official duties. See, for instance, the number of cabinet members, including the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), who keep attending the rallies of the political support group for President Jonathan, ahead of the presidential elections. Related to this is the fact that most governors do not just sit down in their states to govern. Rather they spend more time travelling to and virtually living in Abuja, running up unnecessary costs, in pursuit of political advantages.

  

And need we remind government again that pilgrimages, being religious exercises, are purely personal concerns of individuals, and as such government has no business spending money on anyone to attend them? The time is ripe for government to stop this spending, more so when the funds are usually splashed on privileged citizens who can afford such luxuries.   It is apparent from the above that it doesn’t take so much thinking to cut down cost of governance after all. What is needed is the political will to do so.

See more at: http://www.thenicheng.com/austerity-cut-governance-cost/#sthash.86fUFryL.dpuf

EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THE BOSS

"Reporting Africa, I've always been puzzled by the readiness otherwise intelligent diplomats, businessmen and technocrats show in embracing the 'Blame the Entourage' line of argument. 'The Old Man himself is OK', runs this refrain, echoed at various times from Guinea to Ivory Coast, Zaire to Gabon, Tanzania to Zambia. 
'Deeply principled, a devout Muslim/Protestant/Catholic, he observes, in his own life, a strict moral code. It's his aides/wife/sons who are the problem. They're like leeches. If only he'd realise what they are doing in his name and put a stop to it. But of course he adores them. It's his one weakness. Such a shame.' 
The argument has always struck me as a form of naievity so extreme it verges on intellectual dishonesty. In countries where presidents have done their best to centralise power, altering constitutions, winning over the army and emasculating the judiciary, the notion that key decisions can be taken without their approval is laughable. If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it's because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat's own proclivities."
(Michela Wrong, 'It's Our Time to Eat', p. 181.)

Lest we lose the nail of democracy

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost

For the want of a shoe the horse was lost

For the want of a horse the rider was lost

For the want of a rider the battle was lost

For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail

(Benjamin Franklin)

The above rhyme frighteningly sums up what has been happening to Nigeria’s hard-won democracy as it is being desecrated by a band of politicians whose guiding principle is self, driving force is power and inspiration is lucre.  As we travel towards another era of political war and the sharing of the spoils thereof, the politicians are again at each other’s jugular as they jostle to grab every opportunities.

In the quests for individual diadems, they brook no obstacle. In fact, in the altar of politics, nothing is too sacrosanct to be sacrificed. That much has been in display of late in Nigeria. Governance has since taken a back seat, where they ever existed. It is now politics, dirty, grimy, soulless politics.

See the mess they have made of political party’s internal elections. See the shenanigans all over the land, in many state houses of assembly such as Rivers, Edo and lately, Ekiti and Ebonyi. At another level, the police, under the control and authority of the Executive arm are being used to lay siege on the National Assembly through the attempt to frustrate and stampede out the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

The event of last Thursday, where the speaker and other legislators were denied free access to their offices and later tear-gassed by the police, remains the greatest assault on democracy. Every time I train or talk to people about democracy, I stress the fact that the existence of the legislature as an independent arm of government is what defines democracy. This is as opposed to the era of the military where the other two arms of government – Executive and the Judiciary existed. Thus, the Legislature is the engine room of democracy. An attack on this therefore is a clear attack at the very foundation of democracy.

It insults the sensibilities of Nigerians for the police to do what they did and the president’s spokesperson, Doyin Okupe, claims the presidency has no hands in it but that the police are doing their legitimate duty. Nigerians have had a harrowing experience watching acrobatic displays by desperate lawmakers who had to scale fences to gain access into the National Assembly. We watched as news reporters struggled to report the news in tear gassed environment, coughing and choking in front of television cameras. We saw legislators panting, clothes torn and some close to fainting for the same reason. And I kept wondering, what if someone had dropped dead as it happened in 2007 with Dr Aminu Safana in the House after one of the fighting sessions?

Someone asked why Speaker Aminu Tambuwal and the other fence-scaling representatives did not just turn back home rather than put on such ‘un-parliamentary’ displays. Truth is if they had been unwise enough to do so, they would have been done with. Later when the House sat, I saw a few of the PDP bigwigs like Deputy Speaker Emeka Ihedioha and Leo Ogor in the chambers. Who knows if they would have done the abracadabra of leading a few legislators to claim to remove the speaker had he and his supporters not forced themselves in there? And that is what just happened in Ekiti state where seven members claimed to have removed the speaker in a 26-member House and the state governor now recognises the criminal leadership of the House.

And while all these happen, there are many loose cannons in government circles mouthing political obscenities and sounding drums of war. The latest is Governor Ibrahim Shema of Katsina State shown in a trending online video, describing the opposition to his political party in the state as ‘cockroaches’! Yes, you read that correctly. It was the same description of hate used in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. And just like in Rwanda, the man in Katsina was in the video urging his supporters to squash the ‘cockroaches’.

Pray these politicians don’t destroy this democracy by first losing the nail.