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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • Gas car rigmarole, questions Tinubu can’t ignore – Azu Ishiekwene

    Gas car rigmarole, questions Tinubu can’t ignore – Azu Ishiekwene

    It was not meant to be this way. But like a good number of things Nigerian, the story is hardly complete without a twist in the tale. And so it has been for at least three years now with the story of the gas car that was supposed to lessen, if not end, Nigerians’ petrol misery.

    Sometime in 2020, state oil company, Nigerian National Petroleum Company (now NNPC Limited), launched what it advertised as the National Gas Expansion Programme (NGEP). The major objective of the programme, according to NNPC Group CEO, Mele Kyari, was to harvest gas for car fuel. This was in addition to expanding its use for domestic cooking.

    At the official launch of the programme on December 1, 2020, Kyari said given how important the project was for the government’s pursuit of cleaner, safer and cheaper energy, NNPC would provide the conversion free of charge to car owners and transporters.

    “You bring your car to a location,” he said, “and then we fit in the things you need to call the gas and also to receive the gas into your car. All the one million cars that we promised will be done through a structure that the Ministry of Petroleum Resources will put in place to ensure that any Nigerian who has to convert his car will get it done for free.”

    Kyari said at the time that outside Abuja, the retrofitting and service centres would be available in 12 other states, adding that the Ministry of Petroleum Resources would bear the burden “until the private sector can come in.”

    To demonstrate how serious the government was about the programme, NNPC promised the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) 100 gas-powered buses, out of which I think 50 or so were delivered.

    As surely as big money never fails to follow big talk in conspiracies that often end in heart-breaking scandals, the Central Bank offered N250 billion to “support” the NNPC’s gas car value chain. This “support” fund was announced at least four months before the programme was officially launched.

    A statement by the Bank in August 2020 said each beneficiary would get a maximum of N10 billion at between five and nine percent with a one-year/18-month moratorium for 10 years disbursable in the case of small and medium scale enterprises, through the NIRSAL Microfinance Bank.

    All of this was nearly three years ago. As you read this piece, no one is sure how many of the estimated 12million registered cars in Nigeria are gas-powered or how many of the estimated 6.7million of registered commercial vehicles out of the 12m are on gas. The best guess is on the website of NIPCO, a private limited oil and gas company, with a strong Indian presence.

    NIPCO claims that it has converted 5600 cars to gas, but the data does not say whether this is the total number of cars converted in the last 19 years since NIPCO started LPG delivery. Or just what type of gas conversions took place – whether LPG-type (liquified petroleum gas, more commonly available); or CNG-type (compressed natural gas, with very few plants available in Nigeria). We also don’t know how many of the 13 service and retrofitting stations which Kyari announced three years ago are ready.

    Was the CBN’s N250 billion gas value chain support fund disbursed? If so, how much and what is left of it? Who were the beneficiaries and what have they done with the money? I tried in vain to get the answers. Perhaps the bank or the Ministry of Petroleum Resources can help.

    Two years after the NGEP was announced, Businessday published a story entitled, “FG’s autogas policy falls short,” in which the newspaper reported that, “A combination of infrastructure, high cost of gas, lack of proper planning and prevailing harsh economic realities have affected the implementation of the autogas policy.”

    It’s on top of this mess that Ajuri Ngelale, the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, announced last week the establishment of the Presidential Compressed Natural Gas Initiative (PCNGI) “to revolutionise the transportation landscape in the country, targeting over 11,500 new CNG-enabled vehicles and 55,000 CNG conversion kits for existing PMS-dependent vehicles.”

    Ngelale sounded like a repurposed version of CBN’s August 2020 memo, with the warmed-over promises of NNPC. But I’ll come to that.

    Again, just as it happened when Kyari promised that one million cars will run on gas and that, for a start, over one dozen service stations across the country will be available to provide support, NNPC has promised that in the short run the new gas project would be supported by NIPCO. Kyari did not say how NIPCO’s infrastructure would meet the demand.

    Information on NIPCO’s website as of today claims that Nipcogas – a JV project in which NNPC’s subsidiary Nigerian Gas Company (NGC) owns majority shares – has 15 CNG stations in Benin and is contemplating expansion both in Benin, Edo State; and in Ibafon, Ogun State. But insiders told me that there are only 12 stations in the country as of now, out of which Nipcogas owns 11. How the current infrastructure will convert 11,500 petrol cars to LPG and CNG, much less provide 55,000 conversion kits remains to be seen.

    The demons are, however, in plain sight. The same demons that haunted Kyari’s grandiose plan to convert one million cars to autogas, and also turned the CBN’s N250 billion to pork barrel, will return to haunt the “PCNGI revolutionary initiative” enthusiastically announced by Ngelale.

    It’s not hard to see why. The things Businessday cited as impediments to the execution of NGEP after its launch have not changed – not the system or the people behind it. If anything, thanks to corruption, they have metastasized, with concerns that at least N90 billion of the N250 billion set aside by the CBN to “support” the gas value chain may have been diverted.

    It is also surprising that the government will prioritise CNG over LPG when the latter is not only more readily available, but is also relatively cheaper to convert and maintain. Can we even talk about conversion without data of car owners’ attitude and readiness?

    And then there’s the supply problem. A viable gas car service without steady gas supply is a pipedream.  Africaoilgasreport.com reported on August 18 that in spite of huge oil and gas assets owned 100 percent by NNPC, which could significantly improve its oil and gas production and evacuation potential, the company prefers to play “the politics of financial engineering.” NNPC has become the successor of the Central Bank in the business of everything.

    Also, while the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) said it was still producing in spite of declaring a force majeure in October last year as a result of flooding in the Niger Delta, the company has not vacated the force majeure, raising serious concerns about viable supply.

    And why, in any case, does CNG have to become a “presidential initiative?” Are we going to have a presidential initiative on LPG, a presidential initiative on LNG and perhaps a presidential initiative on presidential initiative? The system is broken not because of an absence of a presidential initiative, but because NNPC, its subsidiary NGC, and the refineries that should lead the gas pathway have failed.

    If in nearly 50 years of NNPC only about 10.5 percent or roughly four million Nigerian households use cooking gas, how can the government prioritise car gas over households through a presidential initiative salvation army, a purely ad hoc arrangement?

    Which serious investors will put down their money in an arrangement that completely ignores the history of past failures and present concerns about mind boggling corruption? And how, by the way, can key institutions such as the National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC) and the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) be left out in any sustainable plan for autogas?

    Tinubu has enough problems on his plate. Hugging a special purpose initiative to nowhere will not do him much good. If the government is really keen on gas cars, then he must return to where the rain started beating us.

  • Tinubu’s list, Gbaja-nisation and Nigeria’s politics – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Tinubu’s list, Gbaja-nisation and Nigeria’s politics – By Azu Ishiekwene

    If President Bola Ahmed Tinubu hit the ground running, it was because problems chased him into office. Yet, it wasn’t long before he tripped on a matter in which his genius has been acknowledged: forming his cabinet.

    One of his credentials for eight years as governor of Lagos, and even outside public office for 16 years, has been his gift for spotting talents and putting them to work.

    He campaigned on this record in the last election. You can therefore imagine the disappointment in some circles when he not only waited 60 days, nearly exhausting the time allowed by law, but then went on to release in two installments, lists that have been widely criticised as an appeasement to the “old brigade.”

    There are, of course, bright spots with a few professionals and proven hands. But a cabinet which features nine former governors, a number of who had lost elections or had been ministers before, gives the impression that Tinubu’s genius for talent hunting may have been captured by vested interests on the national stage. Has Abuja, the graveyard of good intentions, done its worst? Is Tinubu undone by pressure? Or are there forces in his inner circle taking advantage of the chaos to grab power?

    Reality is more nuanced. We’ve been here before, over 20 years ago. Tinubu was not in charge at the centre then. He was governor in Lagos, a complex place to govern no doubt, but far less so than the “beast” called the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was also faced with choices similar to those that Tinubu wrestled for 60 days. It’s easy to forget now, but Obasanjo’s choice of ministers in his first term, much like those of Shehu Shagari in 1979, gives an idea of what potentially confronts a new president, especially one that is a product of a fragile and fraught political transition.

    In hindsight, Obasanjo is applauded for assembling perhaps what has, so far, been the best collection of ministers in the last nearly four decades.

    But it was not so when he first got into office. For those who despise politicians intensely, sometimes with reasons, it might be useful to remember that Obasanjo’s first collection of ministers was a shambles of strange bedfellows. It was spiced with Second Republic politicians retrieved from the museums, and former military governors and army generals who ran the country before the #Endsars generation was born.

    I’m not kidding. Obasanjo’s first list of ministers contained such names as General David Jemibewon; General TY Danjuma; Tony Anenih; Col. Mohamed Bello Kaliel (rtd); Adamu Ciroma; Iyorchia Ayu, Dapo Sarumi; Alabo Graham-Douglas; Bola Ige; Sunday Afolabi; Hassan Adamu; and Haliru Bello.

    Even Ojo Maduekwe, one of the masterminds of Daniel Kanu’s two-million-man march who threatened to go on exile if General Sani Abacha did not run for office, also made Obasanjo’s ministerial list. It was that unwieldy.

    If the team were a flight crew, not many would have been comfortable to fly. Obasanjo knew that but had his reasons for choosing them. The country was just transiting from decades of military rule. He needed politicians who understood the country, and also military-politicians who could help him stabilise things and keep soldiers at bay, while he launched a shuttle diplomacy to rebuild the country’s battered image.

    But trust Obasanjo, the old fox. Once he got his footing and at least part-paid his political IOUs, he shuffled his cabinet within months, followed by another shuffle in his second year, in which he weeded out a number of the worst performers.

    By his second term in 2003, the cub in him had become a tiger drawing in some of the best talents, but also making mince-meat of a good number, including his deputy, Atiku Abubakar. It’s a story triumphantly told in three volumes of Obasanjo’s book, My Watch.

    It’s fair to feel disappointed by a few nominees in Tinubu’s lists who make the legend of Robin Hood look like a child’s play. Some have also expressed concern about the role of Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, who has obviously set a new record as the country’s most expensive bespoke delivery service for political nominees’ list.

    Not a few curious eyebrows were raised when LEADERSHIP reported exclusively, for example, that against the ethics of international courier service, and in the midst of the screening, the integrity of the nominee lists was nearly undermined by allegations of “package tampering!”

    I was genuinely concerned that the controversial news reports from the office of the Chief of Staff could make Mike Oghiadomhe, former Chief of Staff to President Goodluck Jonathan, look like an amateur. I’m not sure any Chief of Staff since 1999 has assumed and executed with a comparable degree of passion the task of dispatching nominees’ lists the way Gbajabiamila has done so far.

    Those who know him well, famously called Gbaja-philes in Villa-pedia, however insist that his performance is out of the goodness of his heart; and so, I won’t let anyone put words into my mouth or ideas in my head about his sterling qualities.

    Since the Chief of Staff has taken over the function of the Senior Special Assistant (SSA) Liaison to the National Assembly as his own contribution to a leaner government, it is my humble submission that the positions of the two SSAs should be scrapped forthwith, at least to appease Labour.

    It is concerning, however, that at a time when Tinubu needs a strong inner circle to get things done, reports of a civil war, with his Chief of Staff at the heart of it, continue to engulf his government. From the election of presiding and principal officers in the 10th National Assembly to the nomination of ministers and God-knows-what-else, the story has been one of near complete Gbaja-nisation!

    Yet, Tinubu’s job is cut out for him. He cannot blame anyone for what becomes of his presidency. If choosing the right team helped him get a lot done when he was much younger and stronger, then he needs that gift even more desperately in the midst of the present chaos.

    The tough, but necessary decisions he has taken already mean that if he has his eye on legacy, never mind a second term, then there’s very little time to settle IOUs or indulge internal strife.

    That’s not all. It also means that while Tinubu would hardly get any credit if the suspects in his cabinet perform, he would be blamed squarely if they fail and he alone would bear the brunt of the difference between expediency and necessity.

    All said, when our obsession with Abuja has faded, perhaps in a week or two after the ministers have been assigned portfolios, we must quickly turn our attention to the states, a number of which offer the premium version of the atrocities we saw on the national stage in the last one week.

     

  • Does social media affect your voting? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Does social media affect your voting? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    When I first voted in an election in Nigeria in 1983, the Internet was just newly born. It had not even been properly named.

    Forty years later when I voted for the fifth time, my daughter who attained voting age only 13 years ago and has since voted only once, as far as I know, was telling me from thousands of miles away, where she now lives with her family, how she thought I should have voted and for who. I laughed.

    This was by no means a unique experience. A very close friend and managing director of one of Nigeria’s leading media houses told me at the height of the 2023 elections that the politics of who to vote for and why so polarised his home that he had to convene a family meeting where it was decided that all political talk was off limits until after the elections.

    As a teenager in 1977 when I followed my parents to the airport to see off my aunt to the UK, there were roughly 120k phone lines in Nigeria. And such luxury well beyond a kid like me from a poor family severely limited not just what I could say to my aunt for many years after she left, but also the speed and frequency.

    Today, it’s a different world!

    A new book by Niyi P. Ibietan, the fruit of his doctoral research, and entitled, Cyber Politics: Social Media, Social Demography and Voting Behaviour in Nigeria, deals with this fraught, long-standing debate.

    Seventy-five years ago, or so, when Paul Lazarsfeld and others took this question to the streets of North Carolina after the US Presidential election to ascertain what influences voter behaviour in what is now famously called the Columbian studies, the researchers concluded that media and campaigns have minimal effects on voters.

    Or to adapt Bernard Cohen’s famous phrase, the press was increasingly vital in awareness and relevance, but not necessarily in voter behaviour and attitude.

    Before Lazarsfeld and others conducted the Columbian studies, contributions from social psychology in the 1930s, especially following the impact of Hollywood which was then on the rise, and Hitler’s exceptional propaganda in the War, had created the impression that people were like “sitting ducks” for information, or what in technical jargon was the “Hypodermic Needle” theory.

    The social context for it in Europe at the time was that it was unlikely for Hitler, especially, to have succeeded, if individuals had not become isolated, atomised and left completely vulnerable to the “bullet” of propaganda.

    By the time Marshall McLuhan wrote the Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), expressing the view that instantaneous communication would undermine geographically based power imbalances, the world had almost gone full circle from Laswell to Lazarsfeld, Melvin DeFleur and other scholars whose studies showed that social factors also play a role in mediating information.

    So, what is the point of Ibietan’s Cyber Politics?

    He not only examines earlier studies on the impact of social factors, including peer, opinion leader and family influences on voter behaviour, he also sets out the broad objectives of the book, raising issues that are both specific and contemporaneous in value.

    In other words, instead of leaving the reader wondering what happened on the streets of North Carolina in Lazarsfeld’s studies decades ago and how that affects him in Gwagwalada, Abuja, Cyber Politics uses Nigeria’s 2015 general elections as anchor.

    It explores, among other things, the question of whether political conversations amongst Nigeria’s estimated 33 million active social media users, especially the influencers as of 2021 had any significant impact on the outcome of the 2015 election.

    Interestingly, the winner of that election, President Muhammadu Buhari, thought social media helped him win. Did it, really? And could it mean that President Goodluck Jonathan who in 2011 actually announced his intention to run for president on Facebook, lost momentum four years later in that space? Or were there other factors for Buhari’s victory?

    What commends Cyber Politics, is its laser-beam focus on the role of three pre-selected social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp – on voter behaviour especially in the election under reference.

    Whatever anyone says, I suspect politicians believe that social media works. Whether it counts at the ballot is another matter – and of course, the subject of this book.

    What do I mean? When it became obvious during the 2023 general elections that political ads were not coming to LEADERSHIP as projected, for example, I called folks in the campaign of one of the major parties to ask why.

    “Well, sorry,” one of the seasoned media guys on the campaign told me.

    “We’re doing more on social media now.”

    I was scandalised that folks who had built their careers in the mainstream and whom we were banking on would leave us high and dry! But I understood, even if I did so with a heavy heart! Why? A BBC online report www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zd9bd6f/revision/7 said, “Politicians are investing heavily in the use of websites, blogs, podcasts and social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter as a way of reaching voters.”

    “During the 2019 election campaign,” the BBC report continued, “the Conservatives spent one million pounds on Facebook alone, at a point, running 2,500 adverts.”

    As of the time of writing, my anecdotal research in the mass communication curriculum of the University of Lagos; Ahmadu Bello University; and the University of Nigeria, turned up virtually no current locally authored full-length texts in cyber politics.

    In light of the exponential growth in social media adoption and use in the last few years, two election cycles after 2015, COVID-19 and #Endsars, students, researchers and scholars would find Cyber Politics a valuable resource material.

    As a journalist, for example, shouldn’t I be concerned about the emergence of social media as the “Fifth Estate of the Realm”, a prospect that the author raised in his book?

    Would this new estate, in which users are both producers and consumers of information, displace the Fourth Estate, especially if as Time Magazine said in its February 5, 2009 edition, journalism was already in its death throes?

    Well, it’s nearly a decade and a half since, and we have seen that the death of journalism was perhaps slightly exaggerated. Convergence has also taught us that it is possible for the Fourth – and perhaps the Fifth – Estates not only to coexist, but also to be mutually reinforcing.

    Cyber Politics helps the voter ponder if the social networks they belong to or the influencers they follow have any potential effects on their political behaviour either in terms of mobilisation or their actual voting decisions. Sometimes we think we’re our own man, until we realise like Pavlov’s dog, that someone somewhere might be pulling the strings.

    The author makes the important point that “social” did not start with the Internet – after all man is a ‘social’ animal. What the Internet or technology has done, however, is to put a seal on our global village.

    But is it true that social media influencers are “motivated to undertake organised campaigns during the election using their platforms, largely due to the need to bring about a better social order?” It does appear to me (and perhaps this was unique to the 2023 elections) that social media influencers were just a force for good as they were a force for mayhem.

    The sludge of fake news sometimes unleashed by so-called influencers, not to mention toxicity of the avatars in that space who often insisted it was either their way or the highway, left people like me bereft and alienated.

    What about the adverse role of Big Tech in privacy breaches and data manipulation – I’m speaking of course about Meta’s $725 million settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter adventure! Were these also motivated by a desire to do good? It would be interesting to see how Cyber Politics 2.0 or any other research into the 2023 election explores these episodes.

    Yet, whatever Cyber Politics or any other text on voter behaviour may say to politicians, our politicians, while they may keep one eye on social media they will, as Joseph Stalin famously said, keep the other eye on “the people who count the vote!”

    Politicians can also not be too far from the millions of voters in remote villages and influencers currently out of the social media loop, who still speak in tongues other than clicks and bytes.

    Yet, even that landscape is changing slowly. What Ibietan does in his book is to help us understand, and perhaps, better navigate an evolving social space where a simple networked device is fundamentally affecting our shared values and interests.

  • Why Museveni video shames Africa – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Why Museveni video shames Africa – By Azu Ishiekwene

    There’s a trending video from nine years ago. If you watched it casually, you might in fact think that it was done yesterday. It was a clip of Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, narrating what happened in 2014 when a delegation of African heads of state was asked by AU to mediate the Libyan crisis at the time.

    Museveni’s account of the outcome of the assignment, which has so far not been denied by NATO, was a scandal – an African shame – on steroids. It’s surprising how the incident remained largely unreported until this video resurfaced again recently.

    It wasn’t the usual anti-Western trope about colonialism, neo-colonialism or imperialism that caught my attention. It was what appeared, if Museveni were to be believed, to be the brazen, daylight interference of NATO in the peace mission of the African leaders and how they responded to it.

    Museveni told a meeting of the Pan-African parliament in Midrand, South Africa, that a plane conveying six African heads of state to Tripoli, including his own minister who represented him, was asked not to proceed by NATO as the aircraft approached the Libyan airspace on its mission.

    “How can African leaders nominated by an African continental body, on African soil, be stopped by NATO from doing their duty,” he asked the parliament, pointing out that even the Mauritanian President, Mohammed Abdul Aziz, who was chair of that session of the parliament, was also on the trip.

    The Ugandan leader described the incident as a classic case of African elite betrayal. As the camera panned the helpless, forlorn look on the faces of the leaders present in the hall, you could almost hear a pin drop.

    I don’t know what Museveni might have done if he was on the plane on that day, and he didn’t say either. It however appears improbable to me that a man who had been in bed with the West for decades would have done anything other than what the delegation on that Tripoli mission did: meekly accepted his fate, like the rest, while the plane returned to base. How could Museveni not see that he was a part of the African elite betrayal story?

    Helen Epstein wrote in her book, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda And the War on Terror, that Museveni owes his longevity in power to billions of American dollars that have been used to train and buy equipment for his army and prop his government. Western aid to Uganda accounts for over 10 percent of that country’s GDP, and was, in fact, up to 42 percent of the budget in 2006. To put it politely, western pipers have always called Uganda’s tune.

    Things only began to fall apart between Museveni and his sponsors after the homosexual rights wars broke out, worsened by his strong-arm tactics against the opposition in that country’s last general election. Not that he suddenly discovered the despicable history of western colonialism and exploitation in Africa or the treachery of the elite.

    Since watching that video of Museveni’s blood boiling over what was apparently a latter-day moment of African epiphany, made after he had been in power for 28 years, I’ve been asking myself if NATO might have asked a plane conveying Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe and Olusegun Obasanjo on that kind of mission to make a mid-air return. Very unlikely.

    If the current crop of African leaders had not eaten the sour grapes of betrayal, it is improbable that NATO would treat them with such contempt. So, what would NATO have done if the airplane defied the return-to-base order? Shot down an aircraft carrying six African leaders on an AU peace mission in Africa? Sadly, the mission is a metaphor for the current state of leadership on the continent; they love life too much to dare.

    Interestingly, there was not even a word of protest from the AU after the aborted mission, allegedly directed by NATO in name only. The mastermind, obviously, was Barack Obama, the first Black American president, who would later unleash perhaps one of the most consequential destabilising forces on the Sahel after the brutal elimination of Moummar Ghaddafi. I’m not sure it was a moment that Obama would look back on with pride. Yet, for the AU, too busy with the politics of subservience to care, it was business as usual.

    Another African leader has been talking lately, making statements that re-echo memories of Museveni’s bluster. William Ruto, Kenya’s president while addressing the Djibouti parliament in June, said something fairly radical. Why, he asked Djibouti, should that country or any other African country for that matter, conduct bilateral trade amongst themselves in US dollars?

    Although Ruto said he was not opposed to settling accounts for trade with the US in dollars, his statement was the diplomatic equivalent of what should have been the appropriate response of that AU-Libya mission to NATO’s meddling: that the alliance had no business stopping the AU delegation from landing on the soil of an African country which, in any case, was not a member of NATO.

    On the face of it, there’s really no reason intra-African trade should be settled in dollars. The EU, perhaps the largest single currency union, conducts intra-European trade in euros. So, why can’t AU, especially if the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), the continent’s financial provider, set up a payment and settlement mechanism to facilitate intra-African trade? As tempting as this option may be and in spite of the obvious advantages including reduction of transaction costs among others, the devil is in the detail. Ruto knows.

    With 54 countries in Africa, it would be interesting to test a continental payment clearing house that is not even contemplating optimum currency area – a slightly different system that would have allowed trading in one or more frequently used regional currencies – but is instead thinking of dealing with 42 different currencies on the continent simultaneously.

    Given the current disastrously low volume of intra-African trade, which is about 18.2 percent or $169.7 billion in 2021, a common clearing house is hardly as important as removing the barriers to trade that have stunted the impact of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA).

    Unnecessary restrictions and obstacles to the movement of people and goods, shambolic customs regulations and border policing — not to mention poor infrastructure and protectionist policies by countries that fear, not always irrationally, that their neighbours are conduits for cheap foreign products — have severely limited trade among African countries and denied citizens prosperity.

    These are not problems that can be solved by settling bank notes or making sound bites. Until African countries develop the capacity to go beyond being just primary commodity markets, always looking outside the continent to consume, in excess, what they cannot produce, Ruto’s wishes would remain what they are – wishes.

    Does Ruto know, for example, that a number of Francophone countries in West and Central Africa which are part of the CFA franc zone still maintain 50 percent of their reserves in the French Treasury in Paris? It isn’t a big secret that France torpedoed the attempt by ECOWAS to introduce the ‘ECO’ as a subregional currency three years ago. How will an African payment settlement system extricate Francophone West Africa from decades of French namby-pamby?

    Also, when Britain announced recently, for example, that it was adding Nigeria’s naira to its list of pre-approved currencies, allowing it to provide financing for transactions with Nigerian businesses in the local currency, it was hardly an act of charity. It was, instead, that country’s calculated response to the new reality of its post-Brexit misery.

    African leaders may chew the microphone all they want in Midrand, South Africa or in Djibouti. Ruto and his colleagues would soon find, as the six African leaders on that aborted AU mission to Libya found many years ago, that the strong have the weak for lunch.

    When vested interests push back against the fancy idea of an African payment and settlement system, as they will, would the mission return to base?

  • Tinubu and burden of ministerial list – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Tinubu and burden of ministerial list – By Azu Ishiekwene

    You may have seen it. The list, of course. Those who think that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not moving fast enough to appoint ministers have offered to help. They have composed their own ministerial list for him and shared it on social media. It’s trending now.

    Just one look at it, however, and you would know that it’s an improbable list, even for a Banana republic. It didn’t make sense. Going by the list, not a few commentators are already relishing the prospects of Adams Oshiomhole as Minister of Works; Nasir El-Rufai as Minister of Interior; and Nyesom Wike as Police Affairs Minister, among other fabrications.

    It might appear silly to ask, but why the desperation? It’s partly because in many respects, we don’t want anything that resembles a return to the Muhammadu Buhari era. It took Buhari one-eight of his first term of four years or roughly the time General Murtala Mohammed spent in office to compose his cabinet. While Buhari was scratching his head, trying to find his footing, the country ran on voodoo, psychedelically called body language, which really meant nothing.

    When Buhari finally came round to it, especially in his second term, he appointed a number of ministers – and some non-ministers, in fact – that made people regret that he made any appointments at all.

    I stopped obsessing about ministerial lists long before Buhari appointed ministers. A number of his ministers and appointees made the office a joke to see. Yet, never lacking in the ingenuity of self-help, they managed to make it serious business for themselves.

    When he reconstituted federal boards in 2017, Buhari appointed three dead people into positions. I guess the anxiety about the next ministerial list is partly because the public is genuinely concerned that Tinubu must avoid these mistakes of the past.

    In some ways, Abuja sets the tone for governance, regardless of many years of the bad habits it has foisted on a failing federal structure. Forming an early cabinet might help not just the rest of the country, but also partners outside, to have an idea where the country is headed and how to engage the continent’s largest and perhaps one of its most intractable enigmas.

    To sustain the speed and momentum of a number of the far-reaching decisions taken by President Tinubu from his first day in office, also, he needs to get his cabinet in place as quickly as possible. But surely not on the timeline of speculators who have not only named his cabinet for him on social media but have also assigned portfolios and given them a resumption date.

    I have learnt, over the years, to pay some attention to what is happening in states and local governments, too. A lot going on in Abuja could be undone by governors who, for example, decide to run amok. And we’ve seen them before.

    We saw how the wellbeing of the whole could be severely impaired by the sum of the parts, for example, when Ahmed Sani Yerima was governor of Zamfara State. The introduction of “political Sharia law” in that state and its distorted application watered the seed of radicalism not only there but also in many parts of the North West.

    Apart from militancy in the South South, President Olusegun Obasanjo spent a chunk of his time dealing with the serious security fallouts of Yerima’s rascality, not to mention the supercharged testosterone of the former governor that could not be restrained until it found a consort in a 15-year-old Egyptian girl. The fellow appears to be back in circulation.

    It’s not funny. Once Yerima stoked religious tensions in Gusau, the flames leaped across 12 other states in the North, raising an army of angry people, especially among the young population, for whom problems common to new democracies, such as corruption and inequality, were framed as moral questions to be addressed by the religious police.

    Sadly, a high court in the state gave a bizarre ruling that circumscribed the freedom of adherents of other faiths or even non-faithers resident in the state guaranteed in the Constitution. “Political Sharia” became a convenient distraction for political leaders who deflected accountability after collecting billions of naira from Abuja that they squandered on themselves.

    No template of ministers by Obasanjo could have foreseen the monster that this zealotry would morph into years later. Boko Haram, ISWAP and other franchises of insurgency found recruits from this religious hotbed from which the country has still not recovered.

    Of course, the North did not have a monopoly of such cautionary tales. When a junior minister in Obasanjo’s government, Nenadi Usman, decided to publish a monthly account of what state governments were getting from the federation account, for example, it turned out to be a scam-fest of who is who. There was very little to show for the billions collected. Governors up and down the country had gone rogue, helping themselves to the treasury and stashing abroad whatever was left.

    A report by Matthew T. Page, entitled, Dubai Property: An Oasis for Nigeria’s Corrupt Political Elite, said, “A 2014 report, for example, claimed that Nigerian buyers accounted for 60 percent of all serviced apartment sales in Dubai. Likewise, in 2012, the sales manager of a Dubai real estate firm claimed Nigerians had invested up to $6 billion in Dubai property over the three previous years.”

    Beyond the description of the buyers as “politically exposed persons”, the general descriptive classifications contained in the report showed that “security sector leaders” and “governors” were high at the top of the list of the Nigerian owners of Dubai.

    While we obsess about the coming ministerial list, we need to keep an eye on what is happening in the states, too. It might be useful not only to be interested in what the governors are doing, but also in who they’re appointing to do what and how, especially with rubber-stamp assemblies.

    Of course, it would be unfair to tar all states with a dirty brush. Lagos, especially since 1999, Ekiti (under Governor Kayode Fayemi), Kaduna, and Rivers have made significant strides and will do well to stay on course. I understand, too, how what happens at the centre– what ministers do or fail to do once bitten by Abuja-mylitis – can affect how states are run, especially in areas of procurement and sovereign guarantees.

    But for too long, states have been on a long leash because Abuja’s poor reputation has made it the trough of every rogue. That’s why we’re obsessed with who is the next minister and who’s not.

    Nobody knows more than Tinubu that even though he carries the same party flag with Buhari, he does not have the luxury of Buhari’s honeymoon period. And should he make any wrong choices – hopefully not – given the scale of the challenges facing the country, he must immediately remove such appointees, instead of indulging them like his predecessor, as if it was some complicated conjugal misery.

    Perhaps by Tuesday when the official list is finally released and laid before the Senate, appointment mongers on social media would take their business elsewhere; maybe to the ethno-religious market, where the tribe and religion of the new appointees would almost certainly become the new articles of trade.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Mmesoma: What really happened? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Mmesoma: What really happened? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I’m not sure what breaks the heart more: her insistence on her innocence or the prospects of a future that now hangs in the balance. For a young adult with a promising future, the emerging facts only suggest one thing: it doesn’t rain, it pours.

    Mmesoma Ejikeme was one of the numerous students of Anglican Girls Secondary School (AGSS), Nnewi, Anambra State, who took the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in May 2023.

    The first child in a family of four whose father eked out a living as an Okada rider, Mmesoma remained not just the pride of her parents, she was also one of the stars in AGSS, a missionary school handed back to its owners by former Governor Peter Obi in 2009.

    Many public schools across the country were returned to the missions after years of neglect and mismanagement by government. It appears that the very reason they were returned has come back to haunt the new owners.

    “My dream,” Mmesoma told reporters in the thick of allegations this week that she forged her UTME result, “was to become a pharmacist or a medical doctor. And I have always studied and worked hard to achieve it.”

    That dream has either taken a fatal blow or may be unravelling after the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) flagged Mmesoma’s result as forged and barred her from exams conducted by the board for three years.

    For a country obsessed with politics, it was a surprise that the misery of this young adult and her family toppled political stories on the front pages for days and even drowned the heroics of the World, Commonwealth and African champion athlete, Tobi Amusan, who repeated her 2022 feat at the Diamond League in Stockholm, Sweden.

    Instead of draping the national flag and posting Tobi’s photos on timelines like we did last year, the public space morphed into a triangle of controversy covering Mmesoma and her family; her school and the Anambra State Government; and JAMB.

    High on emotions but short on facts and logic, the lynch mob on social media, never short of subjects and objects, has snapped-up the vomit. As usual, it is prosecuting, judging and executing with the virulence and toxicity of snake venom.

    Some of the toxicity has also managed to seep in from a bitter spring of ethnic divisions that left the country deeply divided after the general elections. Yet, this tragedy is neither Igbo nor Yoruba; neither Efik nor Fulfude. It’s a human tragedy.

    It does appear that Mmesoma has been duped. Or she may have let herself into something she must now be sorry for. Information from her own video, interviews, and the response of JAMB, tend to show that the “notification of result” in which she claimed she scored 362, was fake.

    Apart from taking JAMB’s word for it, I have spoken with six other candidates who took the same May UTME exam with Mmesoma. None of them has a slip that bears “notification of result,” which the examiner, JAMB, insists is one of the marks of the forged result.

    The mix-up in her date of birth – which actually reflected the date of birth of Asimiyu Mariam Omobolanle, the original owner of the slip who took the exam two years ago and scored 138, and the bar code – also suggest strongly that what Mmesoma is showing as her result, was not her result.

    Candidates get their results through one of two means: either by SMS or through the JAMB portal. The board has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that both methods are significantly secure. Of course, there are numerous fake sites offering everything from “upgrade” of JAMB scores to “self-service results,” complete with options for grades a la carte. I guess you would find similar Ochanja markets, even for politicians.

    Yet, in Nigeria’s forest of desperately failing public institutions, JAMB, especially under Professor Ishaq Oloyede’s watch, has been exceptional. It understands that if the bird has learnt to fly without perching, the hunter must also learn to shoot without missing.

    Except if Anambra State Governor Charles Soludo has other assignments for his investigating committee of eight of whom five are professors, it does not require a committee of eggheads to see that either Mmesoma has been duped, egged on by family, or she may have been a willing part of a bigger scam.

    Mmesoma’s travail is not an isolated case or one-of-a-kind. Perhaps, hers has re-echoed because of the ripple effects. She was on her way to winning a scholarship from the state government, after a N3m award by Innoson Motors Chairman, Chief Innocent Chukwuma, when the bubble burst.

    More audacious is Kaduna State-born Gerald Atung, earlier reported to have obtained 380 points in the same exam. Unlike Mmesoma, however, Gerald got his distinction for an exam he neither registered for nor participated in.

    According to JAMB, “Gerald Atung never obtained the 2023 UTME forms not to talk of sitting for the examination.” Miracle? Even a credulous congregation might argue that at least there was water, before it became wine!

    How did we get here? As in many things dumb and useless, politicians have managed to lead the way to the collapse of values. When they started throwing money at candidates with the highest cut-off marks in JAMB, instead of investing more in primary education, making public secondary schools more competitive, and state-owned tertiary institutions more skills-driven and science-focused, it was only a matter of time before they would democratise the rat race. Now, we’re reaping the whirlwind.

    Politicians have continued to make a lot of noise about JAMB cut-off scores, even when JAMB has said, time and again, that the idea of cut-off marks is meaningless. Owners of private schools and tutorial/CBT centres also use high UTME scores as a sales gimmick and the fool’s button.

    A candidate is assessed for admission not only on the basis of their UTME score, but also based on their school certificate exam result and their post-UTME score.

    Crucially, other factors such as the general performance for that year, compliance with admission rules (by both the schools and candidates) for the course of study, quota catchment, and availability are also important. The cut-off war is unnecessary and irrelevant. What is the use, for example, of splashing cash on a cut-off hero who fails the school certificate examination?

    As far as UTME goes, Mmesoma’s 249 was a good score and didn’t need padding. With 64 in Use of English; 54 in Physics; 74 in Biology; and 57 in Chemistry, I’m not sure if she would have made it into Pharmacy at the University of Lagos, which was her first choice or the Lagos State University, which was her second.

    But assuming she passes her school certificate examination (and/or the NECO, which she is still taking), she might have been in good stead either for a state university, a federal university in the South East, or one in Delta State, which has no place at all for quota.

    Mmesoma’s travail shows that obsession for short-cuts and quick fixes often lead to broken hearts and deeper misery. It’s not about tribe or ethnicity, else Mmesoma would not have chosen all four school choices outside the South East, her native enclave.

    She made the regrettable error of climbing the tree of her ambition beyond the leaf. And sadly, she has landed where there’s no road to medicine or pharmacy and she cannot continue to double down. Life is not over. With help, she can rise again.

    JAMB has made its point robustly. It has rightly thrown out the bath water. It should, however, spare the baby.

  • Titan and migrants: Two tragedies, different stories – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Titan and migrants: Two tragedies, different stories – By Azu Ishiekwene

    It doesn’t make sense to weigh tragedies on a scale. How do you measure them? Leo Tolstoy got it right in Anna Karenina when he said whereas all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

    And so indeed it was on June 14 when it was reported that a boat carrying 750 migrants had capsized near Greece in the Mediterranean killing over 500 with dozens missing. 

    It was one of the most horrific tragedies in recent times, claiming the lives of hundreds of migrants mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan and Palestine who put their lives in great danger in pursuit of the basic human instinct of looking for a better life.

    A world becoming tragically familiar with migrant misery barely had time to shake its head in pity once again when news broke that a submarine, The Titan, operated by a US-based company, OceanGate, had imploded in the depths killing all five tourists on an expedition to the debris of the Titanic.

    Two heart-wrenching tragedies in a space of days and yet the major global news networks could not resist reporting the tragedies on a scale of prejudice that barely disguised where their sympathy lies. 

    The concerned world also rallied a multinational rescue mission for The Titan sparing neither expense nor expertise. The press provided minute-by-minute accounts of the efforts, looking for experts from around the world who had made similar missions in the past. Others got families of some of those on board to share their fears and hopes. 

    How, for example, could anyone not be touched by the story of Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old student who followed his millionaire father, Shazada, on that expedition to honour his Father’s Day wish? We were touched because the press shined a light on the human angle.

    Who knows how many such stories among the hundreds of the families of the dead migrants have now gone untold? Interestingly, the Dawoods whose tragic story is still travelling the world, shared a similar Pakistani heritage with some migrants whose own stories will never be heard. 

    As the search went on, the horrific deaths of the migrants in the Mediterranean fizzled from news flashes to scrolls of ticker tape and soon disappeared altogether.

    From the way the networks covered the two accidents, you would be forgiven to think that they had weighed both and concluded that the lives of the 750 migrants mattered less, if they mattered at all. It was not an issue that the number of migrants who died in the Mediterranean on June 14 was over one-third of the fatality when RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912.

    Somehow, the unspoken message was that the migrants deserved their fate. What else did they want from Europe or the rest of the world? After all, in the last eight years or so, and long before the Russia-Ukraine war complicated things, Europe had opened its borders to an estimated 1.5 million migrant refugees. Yet, in spite of tighter border controls, controversial repatriations and deportations, the wave of migrants has been unrelenting.

    Governments in Europe, especially in Italy and Greece, that spent years sleepwalking over a comprehensive plan to manage the migrant crisis have used rising domestic economic difficulties and the upsurge in right-wing groups in their countries as excuses for cracking down on migrants, sometimes, with the most cynical sea-border policing.

    Since no deterrent appears to have worked so far (not unsanitary conditions, severe overcrowding, poor food and water quality, torture by guards or even reinforced barbed wires), the networks may well have deployed their own – a new set of filtering tools to cover the Mediterranean tragedy: downgrade the story if you can’t help it, otherwise turn a blind eye. 

    Of course, it’s not the fault of the five victims who died in The Titan; it’s the fault of a system that treats people less than who they are because of where they are from, their skin colour – or let’s be honest – because of their economic conditions. 

    It’s improbable that if the migrant boat were some ocean liner on a summer cruise of the Mediterranean an accident involving 750 passengers out of which 500 have been confirmed dead would be given the same shorthand coverage.

    The double-standard between the wall-to-wall coverage of the implosion of The Titan and the short shrift that the deaths of over 500 migrants received at the hands of the global networks reecho the Shakespearean line about beggars, comets and the deaths of princes. Only that Shakespeare could not have seen that modern networks could sometimes make comets for their own princes.

    The hypocritical coverage of both tragic incidents barely hides the fact that even though the deaths touched each affected family in a different way, the material condition of the dead was also a factor in how the tragedies were reported.

    Former US President Barack Obama, perhaps one of the world’s most famous modern victims of right-wing calumny, called out the stark contrast, describing it as “obscene” and “untenable.” It’s an obscenity with a long history, one which in 1977 compelled UNESCO to set up the Sean MacBride Commission on North-South communication lopsidedness. 

    On September 26, 2002, for example, an overcrowded Gambia-bound Senegalese ferry, Le Joola, hit a serious storm at night, killing 1,800 passengers, including the sister and 10 other relatives of the current coach of the Senegalese national football team, Aliou Cisse. Only 64 passengers survived. Cisse was saved on that day by a match for Birmingham City. It was a monumental tragedy, claiming more lives than were lost in RMS Titanic.

    But that catastrophic event remained largely unreported then and remains, to date, one of the world’s most famous unlisted calamities on the global calendar. Only a BBC Africa documentary produced last year, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster and the pillars of the victims’ empty graves, remind us there was such a human tragedy!

    This double-standard sometimes plays out in how help is deployed, after a humanitarian disaster. When the US sent help to Nigeria after catastrophic floods claimed over 600 lives last year, for example, it sent money – $1 million. When a devastating wildfire impacted New South Wales in Australia in late 2019, on the other hand, the US sent hundreds of firefighters. Sadly, three of them died helping.

    To be fair, we can’t blame foreign countries or the major networks forever. If these countries and their networks are hostages to blinkered lenses in understanding and telling our story, journalists in the global south, including Africa, must also invest in telling their own stories themselves. 

    And that does not have to be only when tragedies happen. Otherwise, neither tragedies nor heart-warming stories would have the touch, which as Tolstoy said, connects to us as humans in their own different, intimate ways.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Buhari’s legacy puts Tinubu in tight spot – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Buhari’s legacy puts Tinubu in tight spot – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Those familiar with road travel before fancy luxury buses and jeeps displaced wooden-back Bedford light trucks, famously called mammy wagons, might remember this ubiquitous message in cursive, bright colours scrawled on the rear and sometimes on the sides of trucks plying highways in Nigeria’s South-East: “No condition is permanent.”

    I’m not quite sure what the motivation was. My guess is that it was a message of comfort to the despairing and a warning to those who take life too seriously: No condition is permanent.

    True in life as in politics, that message rang again this week with wide-sweeping changes announced by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu that could affect top appointees in up to 567 parastatals, government departments and agencies.

    You would be forgiven to think it was not a transition from one All Progressives Congress (APC) government to another. The scope, speed and extent of the changes from Tinubu’s inauguration on May 29, make it look like a hostile takeover, the sort of thing one might have expected if the opposition had won the presidential election.

    No one is exactly sure of the number of persons that may have been affected by the changes announced this week. But even if allowance is made for a few parastatals whose CEOs may remain in place and will now report directly to the President, instead of the boards which have now been dissolved, we may be looking at over 3,000. That is, assuming that each of the roughly 570 affected establishments has a board of at least six members. Often, the figure is higher.

    Regardless, every job loss is different in its own way, both in how it affects those directly involved and those who depend on them. Each political appointee has a personal story not conveyed in the usual press headlines of how many have been beheaded, politically, and how many more heads may roll. Like sharks, the press loves the smell of blood, as long as it is not their own.

    It doesn’t matter how prepared those fired may be, they never seem prepared enough when the hammer eventually falls. It’s human nature. And those who take their place never fully learn the lesson of the message on the back of those South-East bound trucks until they, too, become victims.

    Imagine, for example, the response of former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, when six years ago he was told of a statement by the Presidency announcing that he had been removed as he emerged from a meeting in the Presidential Villa.

    “Who is the Presidency?”, Lawal asked State House reporters in a voice full of blessed self-assurance.

    Well, that was his last question as SGF. He found, to his shock and surprise, that no condition is permanent. He had indeed been removed “with immediate effect,” with barely enough time to gather his files.

    He should have learned from the public encounter of the great Nnamdi Azikiwe with Dr. Ukpabi Asika, who had been seconded by the military from the University of Ibadan to be civilian administrator of the East-Central State. Azikiwe had criticised Asika’s administration and the administrator didn’t like it at all.

    He replied mocking Azikiwe as “ex-this, ex-that, and ex-everything else,” adding that Azikiwe was just a politician craving relevance.

    Azikiwe, who had the gift of asking his adversaries to go to hell and still make them look forward to the trip, replied Asika that one day, he too, would be ex-administrator of the East-Central State, as Asika’s father had also become ex-post master general of the post office in Onitsha, his hometown. The message on the back of the mammy wagon, he told Asika, is the inevitable story of every appointee: No condition is permanent.

    Leader of the APC and former governor of Osun State, Bisi Akande, among the lucky few who lived to tell his own story recalled in My Participations, how in 1984 after General Muhammadu Buhari’s military coup, “fallen big men of yesterday wept like babies” when soldiers descended on them as was often the case during military rule.

    In the last 24 years of civilian rule, the experience of political appointees has been somewhat different. Perhaps former President Olusegun Obasanjo holds the record of the highest number of federal firings, especially after he retired scores of military officers who had been “politically exposed”, and followed up with public sector reforms that left even scores more out of jobs.

    Perhaps because Obasanjo’s successors between 2007 and 2015 were also from his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and also because of his longevity in office, no other PDP president after him retired or sacked as many political appointees as he did.

    Sixteen years after Obasanjo left office, Tinubu, a president from a rival party, appears ready to upend a record that once again reminds the public of the message on the back of the mammy wagon.

    Even Buhari, who took over the reins of power as president from the opposition and matched Obasanjo’s two-term four-year tenure, did not seem to have the amount of appetite for table-shaking that Tinubu has shown in less than one month in office.

    Apart from retaining the service chiefs he inherited from former President Goodluck Jonathan for nearly three months, for example, Buhari also retained the suspended Central Bank Governor, Godwin Emefiele, and a number of heads of MDAs, first appointed by Jonathan.

    Of course, Buhari made some changes. But with a few exceptions, he seemed to make changes only at gunpoint. Which was neither necessarily strategic nor carefully thought out.

    There were cases where as a result of poor record-keeping, for example, appointees whose tenures were due escaped removal or where the president yielded to political pressure to extend the tenures of persons who had no business staying on.

    Buhari’s 30-year absence from power, his nearly zero rigorous public activity after office, his narrow, clerically-biased social circle, and his introverted style were major handicaps after his election as president.

    His poor health in his first term did not help matters also. Yet, not a few close to him said once he made appointments, he had a tendency to abdicate rather than delegate responsibilities, often letting some of his appointees run amok.

    That is partly why Tinubu’s actions in the last few weeks, especially the sackings this week, are looking like a hostile takeover.

    But they are not. A number of the decisions taken by Tinubu since he assumed office, particularly the removal of petrol subsidy and unification of the exchange rate, were long overdue. Buhari ignored calls to act, even from a few inside his inner circle, choosing instead to bury his head in chaos under a rubble of debt.

    As for the dissolution of the boards and the removal of service chiefs, it’s a ritual of every new government. The problem, in Buhari’s case, was a frighteningly bizarre absentmindedness or perhaps indifference, that left vital positions, especially in the Judiciary, unfilled; and overdue retirements unattended or indulged by unwarranted extensions.

    On the whole, under Buhari, it seemed, once appointments were made, “all conditions were permanent!”

    To be fair, accusations of nepotism against him during his first term were not entirely justified, at least up to December 2018. The data which I obtained from the Presidency at the time showed a distribution of 278 to 289 in the appointments of heads of parastatals and Federal agencies between the South and the North, as a whole.

    Contrary to the trope of nepotism at the time, the North Central and South West had 102 and 101 respectively. The story changed in Buhari’s second term. And now, the public is watching to see how Tinubu, who has started the difficult task of correcting the outrageous lopsidedness in Buhari’s second term, manages the process.

    Announcement of new policies and personnel changes, however crucial they may be, are only a form of signalling. The more difficult part would be what follows next, especially the institutional changes required to make public offices more responsive, less amenable to the whims of appointees and accountable and service-driven.

    For now, I recommend the message on the back of the mammy wagon to both the incoming and outgoing appointees: No condition is permanent.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Plugging gaps in the Students’ Loan Scheme – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Plugging gaps in the Students’ Loan Scheme – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Within minutes of the release of the video of President Bola Tinubu signing the students’ loan bill into law, it was trending on Twitter as was the name of Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila, who sponsored the bill in his former life as Speaker.

    Apart from the Nigeria Maritime University which was charging N81,500 per semester in 2019 – the highest in a federal university – the average tuition is about N45,000. State universities charge between N60,000 and N120,000, while polytechnics and colleges of education charge less of course, but only slightly less than federal universities.

    Strangely, the word, “tuition,” does not exist in the bills of public universities. In the make-believe world of officialdom, tuition is “free,” in the sort of way that salvation is free, but the message is delivered at a cost. Universities still charge under sundry headings like acceptance fees, departmental charges, course registration, result verification and so on, but shy away from calling it tuition.

    Private universities are in a class of their own. A number of them charge fees almost comparable to those in schools in neighbouring countries, particularly Ghana, a favourite destination of middle-class Nigerian families.

    But the bulk of higher education students — in fact, about 90 percent according to the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) — are in public schools. Out of the 110 private higher institutions, only about two or three, particularly Covenant and Afe Babalola universities, are able to fill their quota. The rest are struggling.

    If public institutions of higher learning are charging about N90,000 per session, a fraction of what even those below middle class pay for their children in private secondary schools (increasingly the place of choice for Nigerians across income levels), it would seem rather awkward, if not ridiculous, that they’re unwilling to pay more for higher education.

    In an article in ThisDay last September 23, former pro-chancellor of Ambrose Alli University, Lawson A. Omokhodion, said he believed that a typical public university could survive on tuition fees of N250,000 per session, whereas universities currently receive only about one-third of that as fees.

    How, therefore, can students’ loans be justified under this unsustainable cost structure? I think it can, but not at the scale contemplated by the new law. And certainly not within the existing structure of the public university system. With a few exceptions, the public university system is no longer fit for purpose. The system is retrograde, stifling and underperforming.

    Pouring resources into the system as it currently is, whether directly, or indirectly through infusion of students’ loans, is throwing good money after bad. I’m aware that long-established systems are difficult to dismantle. But the present economic difficulties make it foolish to turn a blind eye to structural changes for temporary political benefits.

    Nigeria has 49 federal universities, 59 state-government-owned universities and 110 private universities. The first two categories are underperforming and overwhelmed. It’s difficult to say exactly how much of it is a funding or management problem.

    For example, federal allocations to Nigeria’s top 10 federal universities in 2023 range from N25.84 billion to Ahmadu Bello University, to N22.37 billion to the University of Lagos; and from N19.28 billion to the University of Ibadan to N14.31 billion to the Federal University of Technology, Owerri. Yet, the bulk of these sums can hardly cover overheads, a malaise that tends to highlight corruption and sheer lack of imagination.

    A number of private universities are glorified secondary schools. On top of the pie sits the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), a federal bureaucracy that struggles to find its left from its right. Except the system is fixed – and quickly – the students’ loan would at best be a waste or at worst an enabler for producing more garbage.

    Students’ loan is not new in Nigeria, and is quite different from bursary which is still provided by a number of states for indigenes, and is not repayable. Some states even provide scholarships for students in specific areas of need. The students’ loan board was set up by General Yakubu Gowon’s government in 1974 to provide loans to students repayable after 20 years of graduation. At the time, the loans were disbursed to students through the universities.

    Beneficiaries of state or federal government bursaries were excluded from the loans, which targeted the poorest of the poor. But then there were only six federal government universities with an estimated total student population in 1970/71 of about 16,000.

    In 1993, the military promulgated a decree to establish the Nigeria Education Bank and eight years later the university autonomy bill was passed, which was supposed to unleash the creative capacity of the schools, but sadly this has not been the case.

    The state of our universities reminds me of what Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, once told university administrators at a time when he had to tackle Israel’s backwardness and unleash its innovative and creative spirit.

    “Even though I have the utmost respect for the study of humanities,” he said, “If I had to share government shekel between Tibetan poetry and microelectronics, I would have no hesitation putting the money in the latter.”  Nigeria’s institutions of higher learning, especially public universities, have lost their way, led astray by the military, politicians, and sadly, university administrators, too.

    For a start, the federal university system has to be dismantled and reduced to only two or three per zone, at least one of which should be devoted to STEM, the study of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

    The rest can be taken up by either state governments who wish to do so and can afford it or may reorganise into autonomous units for teaching special skills. It’s only after such a restructuring that students’ loans can make any significant long-term impact. And the loan cannot and should not be for all courses, as is contemplated in the current law.

    It should be restricted to only students in any of the STEM courses rather than making it an all-comers affair.  Also, as it was in the Gowon era, and for wider coverage, beneficiaries of bursary should be excluded and universities must start charging tuition and betting on outstanding STEM students and innovators.

    The financial threshold for the students’ loans should also be adjusted from applicants/families earning less than N500,000 yearly to those earning N720,000 or less. Over time, schools with a demonstrable capacity to attract higher endowments could get less than others.

    I find it difficult to understand the rationale for having the Education Bank branches in all 36 states of the country as proposed by the law, if the loans will be disbursed through the schools to the students. With a strong ICT backbone, the country does not need more than two branches of the bank at this time.

    Boards of the numerous parastatals, MDAs and commissions are some of the major public sector waste pipes. We don’t need another 12-member board with all the costs attached to compound our misery.

    I understand the temptation among politicians to milk every opportunity, including this one. The branches would yet be fresh dumping grounds for incompetents dispatched by politicians either to fill quotas or to settle IOUs. The danger in multiplying branches, however, is that they would also multiply bureaucracy, inefficiency and sooner than later, we might be spending funds set aside for students’ loans to service overheads.

    The bank board should be leaner. I honestly do not know what the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) are doing there, whereas the National Association of Nigerian Students is excluded. It doesn’t make sense.

    The law is a good start but needs to be saved from the surrounding ruins to be useful to students and serviceable to the schools.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • What does it mean to be a father today? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    What does it mean to be a father today? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I’m getting ahead of myself. Father’s Day is still next Sunday. But after the Executive Editor of LeVogue, LEADERSHIP’s Fashion and Lifestyle magazine, Nikki Odu-Khiran, asked me if I could write a piece to mark the day, it got me thinking.

    If my father, who passed on May 28, 2000, ever had to write on Father’s Day, what would he have written? Of course, he wouldn’t have written anything. A pensioner who worked as a storekeeper at the Apapa (Lagos) Quays of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) before he retired in 1996, Robert could barely write. 

    But my, oh, my, he could hold a crowd with his speech. And if you wanted to get him going, then talk politics, especially about Nigeria’s Civil War.

    I can imagine what he would have said about Father’s Day back then. Being a father in his time is different from being a father today. And if my children have to write about Father’s Day two and a half decades from now, they’ll probably be using the same lens of wistful contemplation. Every generation thinks its burden is the heaviest. 

    My father would not be surprised, for example, that I didn’t know his real age and never once asked him until he passed. Of course, I wrote 84 in his obit because I had to write something. I got that from asking several sources I thought would know. Not from him. For the over four decades that he lived and as far back as I can remember, I never could ask him his age.

    What it meant to be a father was for the son to stay in his place. Father’s authority was final, unquestionable. Mucking about asking him about his age would have been crossing a line. 

    Fast forward 2023. My children not only ask me to “surrender” my PIN number and God-knows-what-else, my four-year-old granddaughter asks me my name, my mother’s name, and once teased her own mother to call my wife by name. And that, of course, is woke.

    I’m not sure my father would have thought so. Perhaps if he had lived to see his great-granddaughter, he would have half-jokingly, half-embarrassingly dismissed such precociousness as a regrettable consequence of the new-age bug.

    If my father wanted me to become anything other than a journalist, I’m not sure there was much I could have done about it. You studied what you were told, which was often either law, medicine or engineering. Being a father at the time meant laying down the rules about virtually everything from your child’s hairstyle to their course of study. And being a son meant one thing: obedience. 

    Fortunately, my father wasn’t really interested in my career choice. All he wanted was for me to be the best in any career I wanted, a concession which I still find hard to explain, given his dominance in my life. 

    My father believed that staying away from booze, parties and girls was the beginning of wisdom and kept a long cane to enforce it. You really couldn’t blame him.  Ajegunle, where I grew up, was one of the most congested slums of Lagos at the time. Booze was cheap, parties rampant, and girls plenty. 

    Of course, boys being boys (and occasionally with the connivance of my mother), I sneaked off to parties a few times, stayed out late and swigged a few bottles of beer.  I even wrote frothy love letters with lines from James Hadley Chase. 

    However, when I crossed the line like when I went off on my own to see a football match at the National Stadium where dozens died in the post-game stampede, my mother gave me the full measure of a fan belt hung on the door lintel until I was covered in welts and near passing out, while my father turned a blind eye.

    Of my many transgressions growing up, bringing a girl home, even when I was over 21, would have been considered a cardinal sin. It didn’t matter that I was out of secondary school and in higher school for my HSC, my father often warned, sternly, that hanging out with a girl when he was still responsible for me meant that I was in a hurry to relieve him of any further fatherly responsibility. His favourite phrase was, “If you get any girl pregnant, you’re done for!”

    I’m sort of stuck in that groove. Tried as I have to be a modern-day dad, my children — all in their adult years — still know I felt a bit awkward, especially in the very early stages of their relationships. I think psychologists call it conditioning. 

    It’s futile, isn’t it? I mean for a father, these days, to worry too much about the social life of their grown-up children? You worry as they grow up, hoping they will pass every stage of growth when they should. Then you worry when they start making friends, hoping they will survive peer pressure. 

    Then you worry when they start going out, hoping they will keep the right company; you worry when they start going to school hoping that for all the huge bills you pay (and for their own sake) they will make good grades and turn out well. 

    Then when they finish, you also worry about how they will get a good job; how they would marry and who they would marry; and perhaps when they would have children. And when the grandchildren come, the worry cycle starts again. 

    I guess my father had all these worries, too, maybe less so in many ways than my mother had them. Yet, in a way, he had far more control of things than I could ever hope to have over my own children. If he didn’t want me to go out to a party, to see Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me or any of Amitabh Bachchan’s hit movies, for example, which I rarely did, he only needed to say the word and, very often, that was that.

    As a father today, however, if I don’t want my child to go to a party, he could bring the party home by phone. And if I don’t want him to go to the movie, he could watch Netflix on a speed dial.

    If I told him that too many bananas and sweets could unleash the village masquerades on him, which was what my mother told me obviously for my own good, he could simply ask Google. And I’ve just been told that if I give my son a timeout, thanks to the next big thing, Apple’s Vision Pro, he could simply recreate his own new world indoors.

    I wasn’t a sheltered kid. Back in the day, my father was happy to put my school “chop money” into my hand every school day and off I went, either alone or with other students, covering a distance of at least 25 kilometres to and from school through shortcuts and winding street corners on foot. We didn’t have to worry about kidnappers.

    It’s a different world today. Being a father when my children were much younger also meant being their driver for school runs, popping up on Open Day and fretting about what age they should get a phone, things my father would have considered helicopter parenting. 

    Sometimes, being a modern-day father can feel like the Chartterjees in the legal drama Mrs. Chartterjee Vs Norway, only in the domestic sense, where your own grown-up children take the place of the Norwegian authorities. 

    Today’s children have a completely different code of how they want their own children raised, nurtured and treated, different from what your mother or father taught you!

    And increasingly, a number of them relate to you differently. On this Father’s Day, for example, if you’re nice, your son might even offer you a bottle of beer! The mere thought of it would make my father turn in his grave. I can almost hear him say, “this generation is done for!” Is it?

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP