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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • Tight Race: Letter from abroad to Michelle Obama – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Tight Race: Letter from abroad to Michelle Obama – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Dear former First Lady,

    You asked the question that millions outside the US have been asking for weeks if not months: Why can’t America see former President Donald Trump for who he is – a congenital liar, a narcissist, a fascist, and a demagogue?

    At a campaign rally in Michigan on October 26, you criticised those holding Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to a higher standard than they have held Donald Trump despite his four chaotic years as president and his even more crooked lifestyle, long before that. 

    “I’ve got to ask myself,” you said, “why on Earth is the race even close?” There are a few possible answers. 

    Crucify immigrants

    Trump and his campaign have been telling Americans precisely what they want to hear: that their problems have been caused mainly by immigrants stealing their jobs. 

    And that under Joe Biden’s presidency, during which his deputy, Harris, has been the “border tzar,” illegal immigration has worsened to the point where a floating sea of rotten immigrants from Puerto Rico now threatens to submerge their country. They must take their country back.

    He has been telling them that their country, once the beacon of exceptionalism, has been captured by the Deep State pursuing the vindictive and narrow agenda of a few. Trump has been telling Americans that fundamental values, such as freedom of expression and public trust, are under threat. Big media, he says, has been hijacked and can no longer be trusted as arbiters of the public good.

    Socialism redux and victimhood

    That’s not all. Trump is telling Americans that they’re currently in danger of something worse than the nanny state. Socialism and Marxism are in resurgence, and a country known for hard work, individualism, and limited state intervention is at the risk of being overrun by modern-day cousins of the Red Army.

    In case they don’t believe him, Trump is telling Americans to look at his own life, his travails, as a living example of deep-state victimhood. He has been framed, lied against, prosecuted, persecuted and shot at for nothing other than mortal fear that he might indeed be the God-send to make America great again. 

    And if they don’t believe him, they can look at their own lives. In his classic Trumpian way, he has reminded them that they were better off under him, with less inflation and more money in their pockets for groceries. He even said on Tuesday that the stock market was rallying on the expectation of his victory.

    It’s a woke country

    Trump is telling Americans – at least the conservatives –that a wave of wokeism and post-modernism on sexual orientation and preferences has seized America driving it down a depraved slope where gender pronouns will mean nothing anymore. This is the kind of thing that many evangelicals can’t say publicly but are pleased to hear amplified by Trump and his campaign.

    Trump has also been discussing America’s place in the world. He has been saying the world was far more peaceful before Biden, that the war between Russia and Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, which has become a meatgrinder, were enabled by weak US leadership, epitomised by the disorderly and humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

    You might argue, dear former First Lady, that Americans should know better and that the facts, for voters who care, contradict Trump on almost every count. 

    Killing facts

    For example, there’s hardly any evidence for the anti-immigrant rhetoric of job stealing. According to a Brookings Senior Fellow, Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The impact of immigrant labour on the wages of native-born workers is low…undocumented workers often work the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do.” 

    Though Biden said three years ago that Harris was the most qualified to lead the administration’s efforts to manage the border with Mexico, she was never “border tzar,” as Trump has successfully branded her. It was another Trump lie. But all is fair in politics as in war. 

    Is the Deep State after Trump, making his life a misery for leading the Salvation Army? This claim of a deep-state offensive is at least four years old. It started with claims in 2020 that the “deep state” was slowing-walking vaccine treatment for COVID-19 so that he could lose re-election. 

    Scapegoating as art

    Then, when he lost, he blamed the deep state for rigging him out and has doubled down on his anti-deep state rhetoric since, blaming everyone from civil servants in Washington to the FBI and the State Department for all his self-inflicted legal problems. 

    Dear First Lady, the race is tight because voters won’t have facts for dinner. The facts show that inflation, worsened by post-COVID-19 supply chain problems, is cooling, but voters feel poorer than before. They are clinging to the false nostalgia that Trump would bring back the old times, despite the forecast by 16 Nobel prize winners in Economics that the US economy will be worse off in a Trump second term.

    Also, an inconvenient point, dear former First Lady, is that Kamala Harris is part-paying a backlash from Barack Obama’s era that your husband didn’t do enough for people of colour, especially blacks. This is a race of margins, and despite his charm and eloquence, your husband and former president has struggled to convince black male voters that Harris will serve them well. 

    Just as misery loves company, nothing makes greater company for voters than a scapegoat. Trump has scapegoated immigrants, the deep state, China, UK’s Labour Party, and virtually everyone in sight. And the biggest scapegoat of them all is Biden. 

    Unfortunately for him even the best presidents fall out of favour with voters by the end of their first term. Their achievements are often dwarfed by their flaws and demagogues whose mess they came to clean up begin to look like saints. Like Trump. That’s why the race is tight.

    Double-edge sword

    The false start by the Democratic Party after the catastrophic presidential debate didn’t help matters. Whatever advantage it may have conferred on Trump initially, the party lost time healing the wounds created by Biden’s preemptory removal.

    Tight races are not new in US elections, but this one feels peculiarly tight because even though facts and decency suggest that it should have been a mismatch, America is being seduced by its worst self.  

    It’s a measure of the state of US politics today that even after the results have been announced and the winner declared, except if that winner is Trump, the former First Lady may find herself asking, why has US politics gone so low?

     

  • Nigeria: Three stories, one message – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Nigeria: Three stories, one message – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Three – maybe three and a half – stories go to the heart of why Nigeria appears stuck in a rut. And for some strange reason, all of them are rooted mainly in energy and power. 

    The first is about a project, the Mambilla Hydroelectric Project. If you live in Nigeria – except you’re the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu – there’s a good chance you would have heard about this project, which is located in Gembu, Taraba State. 

    In that case, there’s a chance you might also have heard that the national power grid, more in the news for collapsing than for generating power, collapsed three times last week, plunging most parts of the country into darkness. The Minister of Power is too busy making excuses to notice. 

    Mambilla, rolling grid collapse

    But he doesn’t have to worry. Others are counting the number of grid collapses for him. In its lead story on October 21, PUNCH reported that the national grid has collapsed 105 times in 10 years despite the government’s $1.4 billion in loans to fix the problem. If we still have the appetite for more loans to waste, the report said an additional $2.9 billion from the World Bank could indulge our irresponsibility. 

    But that’s just the beginning of the Mambilla story. I’d be foolish to claim there’s one single Mambilla story. There isn’t. But this is a version from several trusted, ringside sources. Sometime in 2003, President Olusegun Obasanjo visited the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station in China, with an installed capacity of 22,500 MW. 

    He liked what he saw and wanted the company to replicate something on a smaller scale in Mambilla. At the time, it was estimated that the dam would generate an additional 3,050 MW for Nigeria, a chronically underpowered country struggling to generate 2,500MW for over 200 million people. The project was divided into three lots at a contract sum of roughly $6 billion to be delivered in five years.

    Sunset on a contract

    Since the word “contract” and Nigeria are made for trouble, trouble started. Sunrise Power and Transmission Company, promoted by Leno Adesanya, teamed up with North China Power and China Hydroelectric to bid for Mambilla. It seemed, however, that that was not the original plan, which was to have China Three Gorges Corporation, the China state-owned power company that built Three Gorges, build Mambilla, or at least build Lot 1. 

    One thing led to another, and the Minister of Power at the time, Dr. Olu Agunloye, who said he believed he was acting on behalf of the Nigerian government, awarded the contract, as turnkey, at $6 billion to Sunrise through “a letter of intent” in 2007. 

    Sunrise and its Chinese partners turned up at Mambilla, as did China Three Gorges, based on Obasanjo’s invitation: two significant contractors, two separate invitations, one task, and one divided government. But the government soon changed hands. Obasanjo was out, and President Umaru Yar’Adua was in. 

    Sorry, we can’t pay

    In 2009, Adesanya pressed Yar’Adua to cancel Lot 1, which was awarded to the Chinese because it was a turnkey project for Sunrise. The government did, but funds were not released for the project to commence.  Meanwhile, China Three Gorges backed off at the first smell of trouble, leaving Nigeria to stew in its misery. 

    In 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari came in and cancelled the project. Adesanya was furious and went to the International Court of Arbitration in Paris, demanding $2.3 billion and $400 million in two separate arbitrations for the government’s alleged breach.  

    Former Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami, doing what he did fantastically well, renegotiated the penalty with Adesanya to $200 million. Buhari refused to pay, and as Adesanya headed back to Arbitration, the EFCC dragged him and Agunloye, charging the latter with seven counts of forgery, contract award without approval, disobedience to presidential orders, etc. 

    Long story short, 12 years after Mambilla was supposed to have been completed with all its transformative promises in power, rail, roads, infrastructure, and jobs (not to mention the missing N30 billion Obasanjo left in the project account), we’re still in a rut, stewing deeper and deeper in the misery of rolling blackouts and collapsing grids.

    Isn’t it possible, for God’s sake – and the sake of the bigger picture – for this government to end the drama around the project and save Baby Mambilla from the stale, disposable bathwater?

    Wilbros war

    This second story illustrates how such a missed opportunity never ends well. It’s the story of Wilbros, one of the biggest things in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, in its heyday. In 2008/2009, when the ego war between Obasanjo and his former deputy, Atiku Abubakar, was at its peak, the EFCC, never missing a chance to outdo itself, said Wilbros senior officials had paid $6 million in bribes to top members of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). 

    A director of the company pleaded guilty to the charge in a US federal court, and the EFCC pounced. Fair enough, but what was the company, Wilbros, doing, and was it not possible to prosecute the errant directors without destroying the company? At the time of the blowout, Wilbros, a US-Nigerian-based company, was building the West African Gas Pipeline. 

    Dream deferred

    It was Nigeria’s biggest oil and gas construction company, competing with Saipem and having over 3,000 workers. The gas pipeline was massive. According to the World Bank, completion of the project would have improved the competitiveness of the energy sectors in Ghana, Benin, and Togo by promoting cheaper and environmentally cleaner gas from Nigeria instead of solid and liquid fuels for power generation and other industrial and commercial uses.  

    Wilbros was at 80 percent completion of the gas pipeline project when the EFCC struck. The matter dragged and dragged. By 2013, Wilbros’s massive pipeline coating plant was rotting, among other valuable assets worth billions of naira. The company was wrecked by its inability to finish the project, yet nothing emerged from the prosecution of the big names bandied about as suspects, including former GMDs of NNPC. Wilbros sold off its remnant to Ascot, and the rest is history. 

    Pan Ocean’s troubled sea

    Pan Ocean is the third story. Pan Ocean, an indigenous oil and gas exploration company, embarked on one of the most audacious projects of its life. Under Dr. Festus Fadeyi, its chairman at the time, the company invested over $500 million in a gas project to feed the Escravos-Lagos Pipeline System and the West African Gas Pipeline. 

    It was supposed to have an impact similar to what Wilbros attempted to do. But there was a problem. The chairman, also a significant shareholder in Skye Bank at the time, had allegedly overborrowed from the bank, forcing it to over-leverage. He had reportedly borrowed about N240 billion, over half of the bank’s total debt.

    When Buhari’s government pounced in 2015, some of the funds had found their way into oil mining leases, including OML 98 managed by Pan Ocean, which was among the seven revoked. The critical point is that all mining leases that reverted to NNPCL, ostensibly in the public interest, have served neither the public interest nor those of the original owners. They have become NNPCL’s ATM. 

    Mother of them all

    The half of the three stories, actually the mother of them all, is the Ajaokuta Steel Company. It’s the story of a wasting N4 trillion asset for another day. It competes with the four state-owned refineries in demonstrating how ego, primordial greed, and monumentally poor judgment could lead to state collapse.

    Yet, carefully and thoughtfully managed, these cases could have helped lessen our current misery. 

    One man willing to go on the record on this matter, Dan D. Kunle, power and energy expert and professional of over 30 years, told me last week, “It’s an irony that Nigeria is suffering amid these great opportunities when presidential intervention could turn the page and bring this country the relief it needs badly.”

    Three stories, one message: Who will bell the cat?

  • Nigeria: Three stories, one message – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Nigeria: Three stories, one message – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Three – maybe three and a half – stories go to the heart of why Nigeria appears stuck in a rut. And for some strange reason, all of them are rooted mainly in energy and power.

    The first is about a project, the Mambilla Hydroelectric Project. If you live in Nigeria – except you’re the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu – there’s a good chance you would have heard about this project, which is located in Gembu, Taraba State. 

    In that case, there’s a chance you might also have heard that the national power grid, more in the news for collapsing than for generating power, collapsed three times last week, plunging most parts of the country into darkness. The Minister of Power is too busy making excuses to notice. 

    Mambilla, rolling grid collapse

    But he doesn’t have to worry. Others are counting the number of grid collapses for him. In its lead story on October 21, PUNCH reported that the national grid has collapsed 105 times in 10 years despite the government’s $1.4 billion in loans to fix the problem. If we still have the appetite for more loans to waste, the report said an additional $2.9 billion from the World Bank could indulge our irresponsibility. 

    But that’s just the beginning of the Mambilla story. I’d be foolish to claim there’s one single Mambilla story. There isn’t. But this is a version from several trusted, ringside sources. Sometime in 2003, President Olusegun Obasanjo visited the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station in China, with an installed capacity of 22,500 MW. 

    He liked what he saw and wanted the company to replicate something on a smaller scale in Mambilla. At the time, it was estimated that the dam would generate an additional 3,050 MW for Nigeria, a chronically underpowered country struggling to generate 2,500MW for over 200 million people. The project was divided into three lots at a contract sum of roughly $6 billion to be delivered in five years.

    Sunset on a contract

    Since the word “contract” and Nigeria are made for trouble, trouble started. Sunrise Power and Transmission Company, promoted by Leno Adesanya, teamed up with North China Power and China Hydroelectric to bid for Mambilla. It seemed, however, that that was not the original plan, which was to have China Three Gorges Corporation, the China state-owned power company that built Three Gorges, build Mambilla, or at least build Lot 1. 

    One thing led to another, and the Minister of Power at the time, Dr. Olu Agunloye, who said he believed he was acting on behalf of the Nigerian government, awarded the contract, as turnkey, at $6 billion to Sunrise through “a letter of intent” in 2007. 

    Sunrise and its Chinese partners turned up at Mambilla, as did China Three Gorges, based on Obasanjo’s invitation: two significant contractors, two separate invitations, one task, and one divided government. But the government soon changed hands. Obasanjo was out, and President Umaru Yar’Adua was in. 

    Sorry, we can’t pay

    In 2009, Adesanya pressed Yar’Adua to cancel Lot 1, which was awarded to the Chinese because it was a turnkey project for Sunrise. The government did, but funds were not released for the project to commence.  Meanwhile, China Three Gorges backed off at the first smell of trouble, leaving Nigeria to stew in its misery. 

    In 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari came in and cancelled the project. Adesanya was furious and went to the International Court of Arbitration in Paris, demanding $2.3 billion and $400 million in two separate arbitrations for the government’s alleged breach.  

    Former Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami, doing what he did fantastically well, renegotiated the penalty with Adesanya to $200 million. Buhari refused to pay, and as Adesanya headed back to Arbitration, the EFCC dragged him and Agunloye, charging the latter with seven counts of forgery, contract award without approval, disobedience to presidential orders, etc. 

    Long story short, 12 years after Mambilla was supposed to have been completed with all its transformative promises in power, rail, roads, infrastructure, and jobs (not to mention the missing N30 billion Obasanjo left in the project account), we’re still in a rut, stewing deeper and deeper in the misery of rolling blackouts and collapsing grids.

    Isn’t it possible, for God’s sake – and the sake of the bigger picture – for this government to end the drama around the project and save Baby Mambilla from the stale, disposable bathwater?

    Wilbros war

    This second story illustrates how such a missed opportunity never ends well. It’s the story of Wilbros, one of the biggest things in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, in its heyday. In 2008/2009, when the ego war between Obasanjo and his former deputy, Atiku Abubakar, was at its peak, the EFCC, never missing a chance to outdo itself, said Wilbros senior officials had paid $6 million in bribes to top members of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). 

    A director of the company pleaded guilty to the charge in a US federal court, and the EFCC pounced. Fair enough, but what was the company, Wilbros, doing, and was it not possible to prosecute the errant directors without destroying the company? At the time of the blowout, Wilbros, a US-Nigerian-based company, was building the West African Gas Pipeline. 

    Dream deferred

    It was Nigeria’s biggest oil and gas construction company, competing with Saipem and having over 3,000 workers. The gas pipeline was massive. According to the World Bank, completion of the project would have improved the competitiveness of the energy sectors in Ghana, Benin, and Togo by promoting cheaper and environmentally cleaner gas from Nigeria instead of solid and liquid fuels for power generation and other industrial and commercial uses.  

    Wilbros was at 80 percent completion of the gas pipeline project when the EFCC struck. The matter dragged and dragged. By 2013, Wilbros’s massive pipeline coating plant was rotting, among other valuable assets worth billions of naira. The company was wrecked by its inability to finish the project, yet nothing emerged from the prosecution of the big names bandied about as suspects, including former GMDs of NNPC. Wilbros sold off its remnant to Ascot, and the rest is history. 

    Pan Ocean’s troubled sea

    Pan Ocean is the third story. Pan Ocean, an indigenous oil and gas exploration company, embarked on one of the most audacious projects of its life. Under Dr. Festus Fadeyi, its chairman at the time, the company invested over $500 million in a gas project to feed the Escravos-Lagos Pipeline System and the West African Gas Pipeline. 

    It was supposed to have an impact similar to what Wilbros attempted to do. But there was a problem. The chairman, also a significant shareholder in Skye Bank at the time, had allegedly overborrowed from the bank, forcing it to over-leverage. He had reportedly borrowed about N240 billion, over half of the bank’s total debt.

    When Buhari’s government pounced in 2015, some of the funds had found their way into oil mining leases, including OML 98 managed by Pan Ocean, which was among the seven revoked. The critical point is that all mining leases that reverted to NNPCL, ostensibly in the public interest, have served neither the public interest nor those of the original owners. They have become NNPCL’s ATM. 

    Mother of them all

    The half of the three stories, actually the mother of them all, is the Ajaokuta Steel Company. It’s the story of a wasting N4 trillion asset for another day. It competes with the four state-owned refineries in demonstrating how ego, primordial greed, and monumentally poor judgment could lead to state collapse.

    Yet, carefully and thoughtfully managed, these cases could have helped lessen our current misery. 

    One man willing to go on the record on this matter, Dan D. Kunle, power and energy expert and professional of over 30 years, told me last week, “It’s an irony that Nigeria is suffering amid these great opportunities when presidential intervention could turn the page and bring this country the relief it needs badly.”

    Three stories, one message: Who will bell the cat?

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • Does it still make sense to trust Tinubu? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Does it still make sense to trust Tinubu? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    This was tough to write. My heart resisted it, but I yielded to my head. The petrol in my car, a 2.0-litre 2012 Tokunbo Camry, was at half-tank the day before writing.

    When pump prices went from 195/litre to 617/litre between May and June 2023, I parked my Jeep and, despite being occasionally mistaken for an Uber driver, opted for the saloon, which, as of the third fuel price increase by September this year, cost about 65k to fill up. 

    After petrol pump price went up again by about 15 percent last week, it would now cost about 80k to fill up the saloon, depending on where you bought petrol from and how badly the pump was rigged.

    The changes in petrol price and energy costs have affected everything else, from the price of fish to milk and the cost of bread and grains. Essential medicines are a different thing altogether. Life was hard. But it’s been a nightmare for millions more since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government was inaugurated. 

    Generation crisis

    In July, The Financial Times said the hardship under Tinubu has triggered “the worst cost of living crisis in a generation.” The newspaper gave the president credit for tackling two of the most malignant economic problems in decades – the petrol subsidy and fixed exchange rate – but said the shock therapy was so disjointed that calling it “Tinubunomics” would be a joke.

    But Nigerians hardly need a foreign newspaper to render their misery in torrid colours. They know this was not the life promised. Tinubu pledged to prioritise security and jobs, tackle the mounting debt, and improve infrastructure when he took office. He came with a pro-business credential and a track record of success in Lagos that was difficult to ignore. 

    In the last year, however, with millions impoverished by the government’s economic policies and two major nationwide protests against hunger and bad governance, Tinubu’s reputation has taken such a severe beating that promises of light at the end of the tunnel have been brushed aside.

    Turn of excuses?

    His government has explained that the rot was worse than expected; that whereas previous governments since 1973 said oil money was not the problem, but how to spend it, President Muhammadu Buhari handed his successor an empty treasury, to which the response has been: yours is a continuation of the APC government, deal with it. 

    Complaints about post-Covid-19 supply chain problems, long-standing structural problems, the protracted legal challenge to his election, and a hostile opposition have also been dismissed as untenable for a man who said it was his turn to govern. 

    Temptation

    Yet, I wouldn’t write off the government, however tempting. If Tinubu’s shock therapy has been disjointed, and his economic policies severely criticised by a despairing public, the tax-and-spend remedy by The Financial Times, the West’s standard response to budget deficits – apart from the added trope about transparency and corruption – is hardly the cure in Nigeria’s case for at least two reasons. 

    Apart from severe loopholes, rampant poverty makes it difficult to expand the tax net or improve the yield, except if the government wishes to levy taxes on blood. Poor industrialisation, even de-industrialisation, and heavy dependence on imports, especially food imports, compound the problem and further reduce wiggle room to raise badly needed cash.

    For Tinubu to dig Nigeria out of its current hole – and I believe he still can – efforts to restructure government income, including taxes, by repurposing the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) must be matched by policies that create wealth. 

    Options for compound problems

    The government should intentionally target industrialisation and food production, with reduced foreign input. Unfortunately, widespread floods have piled on insurgency and kidnapping to reduce farm supplies and worsen food inflation. 

    Yet, while elites like me complain the most and the loudest, the measure of Tinubu’s success is not how much petrol I’m able to buy in my car but the impact of government policies on the rural poor, mainly farmers, who make up the bulk of the country’s 220m population. 

    Tinubu must work with Nigeria’s state governors, who collect security votes monthly before thinking of what to do with it to fix the security problem so that farmers can return. The country needs a system to incentivise farming, one far better managed than the Anchor-borrowers’ scheme under which the Buhari government staged occasional shows of huge grain pyramids that disappeared as soon as the events were over. 

    Examples from elsewhere

    There would be no easy options. Examples of countries that have turned things around show that their leaders defied the norm in pivotal moments. Deng Xiaoping reversed Zedong’s isolationism by introducing market reforms and imposing a one-child policy. 

    Lee Kuan Yew ignored Western prescriptions of democracy, even laying down markers for the foreign-owned Strait Times, limited protests, and restricted strikes and industrial actions. 

    Those who obsess about diversity and size would find India a good example. To the displeasure of the elite, Indira Gandhi focused on rural India. She achieved self-sufficiency in food production, reducing poverty and laying the groundwork for long-term national development.

    One thing common to all three but lacking in Tinubu’s government is energy and speed of execution. For example, three months after he announced an interim measure to remove tariffs on grains and essential pharmaceuticals, the Customs have yet to get the memo – or perhaps they have, and it’s been washed up by red tape. 

    Sitting on the mines

    Sadly, oil isn’t about to take the backstage soon. Yet, our assets, especially oil mining leases in seven blocks, including OML 111 and disputed Pan Ocean assets, have been poorly managed by NNPCL. The corporation that ought to be alarmed at divestments from the upstream and midstream is too busy piling on the government’s debt by brokering crude-for-loan deals to think of what to do with massive, fallow oil assets that it has cornered since 2009. 

    Experts estimate that prudent management of these assets could increase Nigeria’s production quota by between 500kbpd and 1mbpd and improve the pool of investible funds. How and why, despite his experience in the oil industry, Tinubu indulges NNPCL’s damaging and scandalous incompetence, only he can explain.  

    Eat that frog!

    But I’m not giving up on him yet. I’m hoping he was playing politics when the political pressure group, the Patriots, led by the statesman Chief Emeka Anyaoku, visited him, and he said he needed to fix the economy before restructuring the country. 

    Except he prioritises that, the current system, which puts revenue sharing ahead of innovation, competition, production and reward, but instead creates a phantom of Abuja as Father Christmas, will continue to retard the country’s progress. 

    It’s not Tinubu’s fault that the states are yoked to Abuja. However, he cannot make any lasting changes, keep his election promises on security, jobs, the economy, or infrastructure or even inspire the states to depart their waywardness without changing how the country is governed. 

    He starts to lose me, not when I pay a higher petrol price but when his actions show, irretrievably, that despite his solid credentials as an advocate of restructuring, he is determined to put the cart before the horse.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • How Africa is paying for pursuit of the last Hamas – By Azu Ishiekwene

    How Africa is paying for pursuit of the last Hamas – By Azu Ishiekwene

    When the Israeli-Hamas war started one year ago, it didn’t look like it would last long.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to avenge the deaths of over 364 Israelis killed and dozens taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 at a music concert left little doubt it was going to be a bloody phase. But how long, ugly or bloody, it would take for Netanyahu to kill the last Hamas, which was his minimum condition for peace, was hard to tell.

    Unfortunately, with over 42,000 killed in Gaza, including women, children, UN workers and journalists, over 1500 Israelis killed and the fate of 101 hostages unknown, the last Hamas is still at large. The war has spread to Lebanon, and Iran is enmeshed.

    War coming?

    The regional conflict the world had tried to prevent is upon us, and with less restraint and increasing provocation, talk about another world war that sounded farfetched only months ago now seems probable. 

    The war may not yet be on Africa’s doorstep, but the continent has not been an onlooker. There have been widespread pro-Palestinian protests in South Africa, increasing domestic pressure on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government. Art was weaponised in Cape Town flats, with some residents deploying murals and graffiti in Palestinian flag colours. 

    South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been perhaps one of the most audacious jurisprudential efforts to hold Israel to account. Since South Africa dragged Israel to the ICJ last December and obtained a ruling to stop Israel from potentially genocidal acts, Africa’s involvement in the war by other means has become more salient.

    By deciding to drag Israel, South Africa risked bilateral relations of R876 billion in trade. Still, it counted it as a fair price not just to assuage domestic pressure but also as a matter of conviction for ties that run deep and to honour its own historical experience.

    Beyond South Africa

    Israel has managed to ignore the court and taken advantage of the U.S., blindsided by weak leadership and the November 4 presidential election, to ramp up attacks in the region. With no let-up in the Russia-Ukraine war and the supply chain problems it has created, the escalation in the Israel-Hamas war has forced African countries to brace up.

    Egypt has been on edge because of the impact refugee spillover and possible military action could have on its fragile economy, never mind the potential influx of militant Palestinian jihadists. It has resisted suggestions for refugees to camp in Sinai. 

    In August, Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune promised to send troops to Gaza. Yet, the president and Hamas leaders knew that was only a political statement – Cairo would never grant passage that could potentially bring the war home.

    In Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Kenya, the sentiment is pro-Israel, particularly in Kenya. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, President William Ruto tweeted that Kenya stood side by side with Israel and condemned the October 7 attack outright. 

    One year later, Kenya’s position has not changed, which some have argued is partly informed by the robust economic ties with Tel Aviv, especially in agriculture and the security challenge that al-Shabaab poses to Kenya. 

    The authorities believe whatever weakens Hamas weakens al-Shabaab, a terror group that staged more than 10 attacks last June/July alone in eastern Kenya, killing 30 security officers. In Israel’s pursuit of the last Hamas, Kenya feels obliged to take more than a passing interest because a defeated Hamas means less oxygen for its radical sympathisers elsewhere, including al-Shabaab.  

    Giant asleep

    Nigeria, the continent’s largest economy and its most populous, has offered a muted, somewhat confused response to the Israeli-Hamas war. The official line, worn for use after decades of lip service and repeated at this year’s UNGA, is a two-state solution. That’s also the official position of the African Union (AU). However, the precarious, almost 50-50 Muslim-Christian population leaves the Nigerian government walking on eggshells in Israeli-Palestinian matters. 

    It is cautious not to offend the predominantly Muslim North and potentially spark deadly pro-Palestinian sectarian protests. It is also careful not to offend Christian sensibilities in the South, especially a growing evangelical population that considers itself a part of New Testament Israel. 

    Over the years, Nigeria has cooled from a radical supporter of liberation struggles on the continent and elsewhere to a somewhat insular patron. It has been subdued by its internal problems of insecurity and economic hardship.

    It’s not certain how the Nigerian government would respond to Israel’s current two-pronged war in pursuit of Hamas and Hezbollah, with Iran in the mix. But an escalation might, among other things, affect oil prices, Nigeria’s mainstay, and complicate the already fraught domestic petrol product market. 

    Experts have said a repeat of the oil market chaos caused by the Middle East crisis of 1973-74 is unlikely. However, with a far larger population and a barely competitive economy, today’s Nigeria is far from the conditions that made it benefit from the Middle East chaos five decades ago. 

    More migration headache

    Yet, the price Africa is paying is beyond the reading of its vital economic signs. Of the thousands caught up in Lebanon, the new epicentre of the conflict, many are African migrant workers. Following the escalation of the conflict, the Kenyan government has asked approximately 26,000 nationals in Lebanon to get help if they need to evacuate. 

    The governments of Ethiopia (another African country with a significant migrant population in Lebanon), Uganda, Nigeria and South Africa are watching closely in a phase that may worsen the already complicated global migration and humanitarian crisis.

    What started as the hunt for the last Hamas a year ago has grown into the pursuit of the last Hezbollah, and now, it seems, to their last supporters as well. However, as I wrote in a previous article, history teaches that war against an idea is unwinnable. Israel’s existence is proof enough if Netanyahu and the remnant hardliners in his cabinet cared to learn.

    Untested leverage

    Unlike in the 1970s, when few African countries had diplomatic ties with Israel, the country’s footprint on the continent has grown to the point where 44 of 54 countries have recognised Israel’s statehood. 

    It’s fair to argue that Netanyahu only listens to Netanyahu. Yet, for whatever it is worth, the continent does not have to wait to pay a much higher price for this war before closing ranks and leveraging its closer ties to pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire. Except, of course, if the closer relationship means nothing.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • LEADERSHIP: A story still telling 20 years after – By Azu Ishiekwene

    LEADERSHIP: A story still telling 20 years after – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Several good things happen in the bedroom, often the place of rest and renewal. Sometime in 2004, Sam Nda-Isaiah and his wife Zainab conceived the idea of a newspaper there. 

    She told the story before of how her husband got up in the wee hours, scribbled a few things in a jotter, and asked what she thought of the names and the sketch. That was not the day the newspaper started, of course. But it was only a matter of time.

    That idea, which later became LEADERSHIP, has evolved from the feisty flimsy of decades ago into a news content company with a stable comprising some of Nigeria’s most fearless and authoritative news brands. Let’s walk back through the years that fostered this growth.

    The pharma’s lab

    Sam, as the founder was fondly called, was a journalist who happened to be a pharmacist. His father, Clement, was one of Northern Nigeria’s most durable newspaper deskmen with a strong interest in sports. He worked in New Nigerian Kaduna, but his influence and reputation went far and wide. 

    His son, Sam, branched off into journalism after studying Pharmacy at the Obafemi Awolowo University Ife and working briefly at Pfizer. The transition might have been a vocational accident. I think, more appropriately, it was a triumph of the genes. He first joined Daily Trust, then in its infancy, as one of the newspaper’s columnists. 

    After years of column-writing, he compiled his selected works into a book, Nigeria: Full Disclosure, before launching a newspaper. It took a lot of work, though. Before the newspaper, he started a newsletter, LEADERSHIP Confidential, a highly-prized window on life, politics and powerplay among Abuja’s high and mighty, patronised by embassies and the political glitterati. 

    Confidential mafia

    Professor Mahmood Yakubu, Malam Abba Kyari, Adamu Adamu, Mamman Daura, Abba Mahmood, and Adamu Suleiman, people who knew the dark secrets of government, were among the most valuable anonymous contributors. But the newsletter wasn’t enough for Sam, the man of big ideas. He wanted to do more. 

    He gathered the money from the launch of Full Disclosure, which was about N20m then. With a small team comprising Nnamdi Samuel, Abraham Nda-Isaiah, Uche Ezechukwu, Demola Abimboye, Winifred Ogbebo, Douglas Ejembi, Audee Giwa, Kingsley Chukwu, among his earliest staff, he released a preview towards the end of September 2004, before the maiden edition on October 4, dedicated to God and country. 

    God and newspapers

    I’m not sure God reads newspapers. But countries pay attention. A few notable newspapers have significantly affected the course of their countries for ill or for good. When Rudolph Hearst started the New York Journal, his motive was clear: how to run Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World out of town. 

    That rivalry inflamed one of the most hysterical eras in American journalism, including Hearst’s use of his press to instigate deadly conflicts with Spain.

    However, the US press also had its unlikely heroes, one of the most remarkable being Katherine Graham, daughter of the founder of The Washington Post. 

    Whatever Jeff Bezos may have unmade of the brand today, ThePost, on Katherine Graham’s watch, was the newspaper that defied the US government to publish the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate story, two of the most consequential scoops of the 21st century. 

    Loaded gun

    I’m not saying LEADERSHIP is The Post. Not yet. I’m saying that newspapers can affect their countries’ trajectory one way or the other. Lord Beaverbrook eloquently said, “[Press power] is a flaming sword, which will cut through any political armour…that is not to say that any great newspaper or group of newspapers can enforce policies or make or unmake governments at will, just because it is a great newspaper.

    “Many such newspapers are harmless because they do not know how or when to strike. They are in themselves unloaded guns. But teach the man behind them how to load and what to shoot at; they become deadly.”

    The youngest and longest-serving Former British Labour Party Prime Minister, Tony Blair, knew this. For most of his years in Number 10, whenever the media mogul Rupert Murdoch called once, Blair answered twice.

    But again, LEADERSHIP is not SUN or Times of London. Nor is Olusegun Obasanjo, Blair. Yet, Nigeria’s President Obasanjo would not forget LEADERSHIP in a hurry. In Too Good to Die: Third Term and the Myth of the Indispensable Man, the epic catalogue by Chidi Odinkalu and Aisha Osori, we read about the daring ambition of the former president to wrest an illegal third term. 

    Beacon, always

    Even in its infancy, LEADERSHIP was perhaps the most consequential newspaper that frustrated Obasanjo’s ambition. It has remained just as much a scourge of crooked leaders as a champion of Nigeria’s unity. 

    For example, Imam Abubakar Abdullahi came to the limelight after the company’s awards and conference subsidiary recognised the cleric for sheltering Christians in his mosque at the height of the deadly sectarian violence of 2018 in Jos. 

    Again, this year, Auwalu Salisu, a Kano-based tricycle rider awarded by the newspaper for returning N15m to the owner, received an avalanche of praise, including a cash award of N250m by the Niger State government, which Governor Mohammed Umar Bago has redeemed and kept in the care of the Sam Nda-Isaiah Foundation.

    The newspaper remains fervent in its fight for press freedom, regardless of which Witchfinder General wants to undermine the press. Its dogged pursuit of the “unidentified” persons who murdered Nigerian journalist James Bagauda Kaltho in 1996, for example, led it through a labyrinth of minefields from Durbar Hotel, Kaduna, where he was bombed, through the trail of one Russell Hanks believed to have been a US envoy in Nigeria, and back to the US Embassy. The murder is still unresolved.

    Neighbour-to-neighbour

    There is another moment that bears retelling. In the heady days after the 2015 general elections, when the former Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godsday Orubebe, besieged INEC Chairman Professor Attahiru Jega and threatened hell as the final results were being announced, the rogue economic wing of the PDP under the auspices of Neighbour-to-Neighbour, offered publishers vast sums of money to publish an advert that President Goodluck Jonathan had won the election. 

    An unsuspecting LEADERSHIP staff collected the money and gleefully called the publisher to inform him that the newspaper’s bread had been buttered. Sam, whose fury, even at the best of times, was like a raging storm, was on another level of fury. He ordered that the bag of cash be returned immediately. Not long after the money was returned, Muhammadu Buhari was announced the winner, and Jonathan conceded defeat within the hour. 

    Ghana-Must-Go!

    In these 20 eventful years, LEADERSHIP readers have had an unfailing companion – Ghana-Must-Go, the irreverent cartoon strip on the back page. In my time here, I can only remember once when GMG was stricken and bereft of wit: December 11, 2020, when Sam passed. The cartoon character was, understandably, devastated: Its life, the life of the newspaper and many who depended on it, was suddenly hanging by a thread!

    The last twenty years have been quite an odyssey, with the fast-changing media ecosystem, the increasing adoption of generative Artificial Intelligence, Big Tech’s abuse and misuse of content, rising costs, and changing audience demographics forcing the industry to recalibrate. 

    Overall, though, the journey that started in the bedroom over twenty years ago has made significant strides for God and country!

    And long may it live!

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • Home run for Oshiomhole – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Home run for Oshiomhole – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had barely finished announcing the result of last Saturday’s Edo governorship poll when I got a call to eat the humble pie. Senator Adams Oshiomhole, the man I called a product vendor in my last article, had pulled off another big one!

    Why? I had no dog in the fight. But I got the drift. I had warned that given Oshiomhole’s reputation for campaigning for candidates for whom he often ended up apologising, voters could hardly ignore the warning label on his candidate, Monday Okpebholo, and that, at any rate, if it wasn’t that in politics, crime multiplies grace, Comrade’s factory should have been sealed or closed long ago.

    But he got this one, right? Okpebholo, who Oshiomhole carried on his back throughout the campaign, is now governor-elect. The Comrade is entitled to ask his critics to eat the humble pie. Fair enough. While I shop for the sugar-free variety, let’s review the poll, starting with issues we might agree on. 

    Powershift 

    Rotation or zoning is still a crucial factor in politics. The two leading parties in the contest—the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)—put forward candidates from Edo Central, which had not produced a governor before, except for the brief spell of Oserheimen Osunbor.

    The governor-elect, Okpebholo (APC), and his rival, Asue Ighodalo (PDP), are from this senatorial district. But the Labour Party thought differently: the party put forward Olumide Akpata from Edo South, which, apart from being the home of Governor Godwin Obaseki, had also produced more governors than any other. Akpata invited the fight to his crowded backyard.

    The first thing Saturday’s election taught was that Edo people wanted power to shift elsewhere. Ighodalo may not have reaped the full benefit, but the result showed that he defeated Okpebholo in Edo Central, even though he currently represents this zone in the Senate. That lesson – that zoning matters – was lost on Labour, and it paid dearly for it.

    Godfather never sleeps

    Godfathers matter, too. In elite circles and on TV discussion programmes, we can criticise godfathers and call them names, like I called Oshiomhole, a decorated vendor of lousy products. It doesn’t matter, as the results of the poll have shown. The election was a contest of godfathers: Oshiomhole vs. Obaseki, each with a hefty trail of other godfathers lurking in the shadows. 

    If godfathers didn’t matter, Obaseki wouldn’t go, like a thief in the night, accompanied by Ighodalo, to the Abuja private residence of the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, his interim godfather four years ago in a desperate attempt to curry favour. 

    Complaining about the role of godfathers in our elections won’t change anything. Party members or their sympathisers must be prepared to put their money and energy where their mouth is. It’s a waste of time to disregard party funding and involvement in party organisation, only to complain at elections that Piper Godfathers are playing a disgusting tune. They will.

    Oshiomhole has redeemed himself as a preeminent product vendor and godfather of Edo politics. He has also retired Obaseki to Afrinvest or whatever may be left of his investment company.

    There’s a life lesson here, too: choose your fight. The question was not who Obaseki was fighting but who he was not fighting. He fought Oshiomhole, fought those who sheltered him from vagrancy four years ago, fought his deputy, fought relations of his deputy in the civil service, fought anyone remotely connected to Oshiomhole, fought the Palace, and fought anyone who advised him to stop fighting. Ultimately, he’ll have to deal with the echoes of what might have been – alone.

    Over their dead body

    The poll tells us yet another thing—something the PDP may learn over its dead body: that the division in the party that snatched its cap in 2023 may behead it sooner than later. The ruling APC has had problems, especially concerning the chairman’s home troubles and the power tussle in the North Central. However, the gold for internal chaos must go to the PDP and the Labour Party. 

    Even though PDP governors converged on Benin during the election to present a common front, the party’s core – the governors and its National Working Committee – has been wracked by divisions. The same problem has split the Labour Party down the middle, with each party’s faction claiming to be the authentic one. On Saturday, the candidates of both parties were, strictly speaking, political orphans struggling to get to shore from the parties’ sinking boats.  

    Broken 

    Saturday also cleared any doubts that voter apathy is an increasingly severe problem. In a state with a population of about 4.4 million and over half registered voters, voter turnout was 24.49 percent. We have seen this trend in virtually every election. All that happens the day after is the parties and INEC trading blame. 

    Until politicians restore trust and people begin to see elections as a viable means of making politicians accountable, the voter numbers will continue to drop. 

    To make matters worse, elections have become warfare. For example, the ratio of voters to security personnel in the Edo election was 1:11. Ultimately, voters are either overwhelmed by indifference or lethargy or discouraged by fear. 

    But who cares? Once the results are announced and the winner is declared, those who are displeased and have the money go to court. Voters go home until the next cycle.

    Adding up

    Discrepancies between the figures on the election result viewer portal (iREV), the number of accredited voters, and what INEC finally announces remain a severe headache. The bimodal accreditation system’s whole point was to reduce significant disputes over figures and make the process more transparent. 

    Some progress has been made since Mike Tyson was on the voter roll, and palm kernel shells were improvised as thumbprints. Yet, it’s a considerable irony that the same system, which seemed to work well in 2020 and was praised by the PDP and independent monitors as a contributory factor for the poll’s success that year, was perhaps one of the most contentious in Saturday’s vote. INEC must get its act together.

    Never say, never

    And finally, we saw again on Saturday that interests are the only thing permanent in politics. And I’m not talking here about Philip Shaibu changing parties like underwear, although you would be right to cite that as a good example. I’m talking about Ighodalo and what might have been. 

    In case you missed it, Senator Babafemi Ojudu shared a viral message last week: Asue Ighodalo was a member of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu transition committee after he was elected Lagos State governor in 1999. In another life, Ighodalo, a dyed-in-the-wool Lagos Boy, might have been on Tinubu’s side, as Obaseki once was. What politics cannot divide does not exist.

    But who knows? Never say never. If lousy product vendors can get a second – even a third – life, you never know what the future holds. As they wrote on the tail of that famous mammy wagon to Eastern Nigeria many years ago: No condition is permanent!

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and the author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • Edo polls and the famous product vendor – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Edo polls and the famous product vendor – By Azu Ishiekwene

    By his admission, Senator Adams Oshiomhole is a lousy product vendor. In the real commercial world, his premises would have been closed and his products banned. But in politics, crime multiples grace. Oshiomhole dragged Godwin Obaseki into the governorship race in 2016 when the odds were against him. Obaseki’s daytime job was minding his business at Afrinvest, a financial services company he founded. But he soon landed a side hustle as chairman of the Edo State Economic and Strategy Team in Osadebey House, Benin.

    When Oshiomhole wanted to hand over the baton in 2016, after two terms as governor, Obaseki, the Lagos Boy, didn’t look like it. He was not sellable. Pius Odubu, the deputy governor, was in good stead and seemed favoured to get it by most accounts. 

    Tinubu-Fashola model

    But Oshiomhole wanted to replicate the Tinubu-Fashola template in Lagos. He wanted to be the Tinubu of Edo and to make Obaseki, the technocrat and worldly-wise businessman, the Fashola. That was how Odubu, the local politician and village man, lost out.

    A Lagos-based multibillionaire with a sprawling business empire also backed the plan, which finally earned Obaseki the ticket as a candidate for the All Progressives Congress (APC). Oshiomhole portrayed Obaseki as a genius, the special one that the Edo people had been waiting for while demonising his challenger in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Osagie Ize-Iyamu. 

    As I said in an article at the time, there was no name that Oshiomhole didn’t call Ize-Iyamu, except the name his parents gave him: Osagie. This man, he said, was a lousy product, undeserving of the vote of the Edo people.

    Short honeymoon

    Genius Obaseki won, but the honeymoon didn’t last. It didn’t take one year before he fell out with his promoter, Oshiomhole. The disagreement was not about performance or party programmes. It was about whether or not Tony Anenih, Oshiomhole’s mortal enemy, should have been given a state burial and also about control of the state’s resources. 

    The off-season governorship poll in Edo made matters worse. Obaseki inherited a parliament installed in 2015 when Oshiomhole was governor, and the lawmakers’ reelection in 2019 came one year ahead of Obaseki’s. He managed to work with the lawmakers for the first three years of his tenure because they were all predominantly members of the same party. 

    When he switched to the PDP after he was denied the APC governorship ticket in 2020, a predominantly APC parliament fiercely loyal to Oshiomhole was in place. The House was a lion’s den, and Obaseki knew he would have had to plot his survival if he won reelection. Oshiomhole went around Edo State begging voters to forgive him for selling them a “bad product,” the same product he used his mouth to advertise as a genius deal in 2016. 

    This time, he offered them Osagie Ize-Iyamu, whom he had demonised and written off four years earlier as the rebranded new deal. Of course, voters rejected the offer. Obaseki, who had defected to the opposition PDP with his deputy, Philip Shaibu, won the election.

    To survive, Obaseki governed with a hobbled parliament. Over half of the state lawmakers were camped in Oshiomhole’s house in Abuja because the governor refused to swear them in. 

    Vendor begs again

    The vendor has been begging again for the sins he committed against the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, hoping that forgiveness might also pave the way for the APC’s candidate, Monday Okpebholo, in this weekend’s governorship election. 

    It won’t be long before we know what the voters think. The stage is set for a three-way race among Okpebholo (APC), Asue Ighodalo of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Olumide Akpata of the Labour Party (LP). 

    According to the election watchdog, Yiaga Africa, there are 17 parties with about 2.6 million registered voters. For nearly two-and-a-half decades, the political contest in Edo has been between two parties – until last year’s presidential election altered the landscape, producing a result that gave Labour 56.97 percent of the votes cast in the presidential election, a senator, and a member of the House of Representatives.

    The battlegrounds

    The battle this weekend will be fierce in two senatorial districts – Edo Central, where the two leading candidates, Okpebholo and Ighodalo, are from, and the South, which produced a senator and a federal House member from the Labour Party and is also the stronghold of the Obaseki and his ally and former SSG, Osaradion Ogie.

    It was in the Central, formerly a PDP bastion, that Okpebholo defeated Clifford Ordia, a two-term senator. This weekend’s contest gives Okpebholo a chance to prove his victory was not a fluke in an election where the two leading candidates, both from this constituency with the least local governments (five) and lowest number of registered voters 440,514 (16.68 percent), have everything to play for.

    The South is the main battleground, the state’s vote bank with 1,526,699 (57.81 percent) registered voters and seven local governments. It is also crucial to the outcome for other reasons. Apart from being the governor’s base and the home of the Labour candidate, it is also the most cosmopolitan, partly explaining the Labour Party’s emergence as a force.

    The South is where the governor’s record in the last eight years and the credentials of those who want to succeed him might face the strictest scrutiny. Yet, like most elite populations, it is also the most unreliable in outcomes. If it rains too much, the weather is too hot, or the fear of violence becomes a clear and present danger, the elite has an excellent excuse to shun the poll and sit at home. 

    With the APC and PDP threatening to make the election a do-or-die affair and allegations by the PDP that the APC plans to use force and intimidation to rig the poll, low voter turnout, especially in urban areas in Edo South, is a clear and present threat. This danger may erode any benefits for Ighodalo from the combined forces of Obaseki and Ogie from Oredo and Ikpoba Local Governments and tip the scales in favour of the APC and Labour Party candidates.

    Not on the ballot?

    Oshiomhole is not on the ballot. His reputation as one of Edo’s most famous product vendors of the past eight years is. With six local governments and 673,794 (25.51 percent) registered voters, Edo North, Oshiomhole’s home base, is the second-largest vote bank in the state. It is also the base of Philip Shaibu, the stranded deputy governor. 

    I guess that Obaseki’s style – not to mention his take-no-prisoner politics, a bad habit he may have inherited from his estranged promoter, Oshiomhole – may have further alienated him and reduced the chances of his candidate, Ighodalo, making significant inroads in the North. Prominent people in PDP who sheltered Obaseki from vagrancy in 2020 against whom he turned his back are waiting to take revenge. 

    Will it be the triumph or perhaps the redemption of the product vendor? Will President Bola Ahmed Tinubu get his vindication four years after Obaseki’s campaign mocked him with, “Edo no bi Lagos?” Or will this be Obaseki’s chance to affirm himself as the new political force in Edo and shut down the production factory of the decorated lousy product vendor once and for all?

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • Ghost of the witchfinder general – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Ghost of the witchfinder general – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I don’t get involved with what the security services do or how. Their ways are so complex and their motives so unsearchable that sometimes you’ll be forgiven for thinking that working from the answer to the question is the standard operating procedure. Of course, you are told that whatever happens in between is in the public interest.

    As far as fiction imitates life, there is a striking resemblance between the recent hyperactivity in Nigeria’s security services and what happened in a novel set in mid-17th century England.

    Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (famously called “Double Trouble” by the English press) is a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan and the coming of the End Times.

    The part that reminds me of what is obviously a hectic season for the security services – from the arraignment of the #EndBadGovernance protesters on charges of felony to the police raid on Labour House and run-ins with the NLC president and civil society activists – is the time in England when, according to Pratchett and Gaiman, witch-finding was a respectable profession.

    General Hopkins

    At that time, there was a certain General named Matthew Hopkins. You would think that in pre-industrial England, when poverty, disease and unemployment were rampant, the last thing the state would be interested in would be a witch-hunt. But no. Witch-hunting was good business.

    Hopkins charged each town and village nine pence for every witch he found. But that wasn’t enough. Since he wasn’t paid by the hour, and the reward for not finding any witches was a thank you and a bowl of soup, he invented a way to earn more. He went out of his way to find witches, which made him unpopular in the towns and villages.

    When Hopkins’ madness became insufferable, the villagers framed him as a witch, much to the pleasure of the local authorities, who were also tired of paying him. They hanged him. Hopkins, by many accounts, became the last Witchfinder General in England.

    The world may have substantially passed the time when people were hunted, hanged and burned at the stake on suspicion of witchcraft. But I’m concerned that there is a growing similarity between witchcraft and how Nigeria’s security services look for enemies.

    A British suspect

    Listening to the spokesperson of the Nigeria Police Force, Olumuyiwa Adejobi, explain why the force raided Labour House, the siege on the Labour leadership, and the charge of treason against protesters and their alleged British sponsor, Andrew Martin Wynne, I can almost see the ghost of 17th century England. By his looks – and one must respect his decision to keep his shaggy hair and matted beard – Wynne might have been lumped together with those in the “pointy hat” in those days.

    Not in Nigeria

    But Nigeria is not Hopkins’ England. This is not 1961 when Joseph Tarka was detained for three weeks and charged with treason by the Crown for “inciting” the protests in Tiv land, only to be acquitted later for lack of evidence.

    It is not the Nigeria of 1962 when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was prosecuted for treasonable felony for purportedly working with Ghana to overthrow the government of Nigeria, a scandalous charge borne out of politics rather than law.

    Anthony Enahoro, a journalist’s journalist and scourge of the British government, was also jailed twice for sedition, once for an article mocking a former governor and then for another article “inciting Nigerian troops against the British army.”

    Then, he was deported from England as a “fugitive offender” and jailed a third time along with Awolowo for treasonable felony.

    This is not the Nigeria of military president General Ibrahim Babangida, where human rights activists Gani Fawehinmi, Femi Falana, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Baba Omojola were hounded and imprisoned on the spurious charge of treason by a military government that had lost its way. It is not the Nigeria where Babangida deported sociology lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Patrick Wilmot for the “treasonable sin” of teaching what “he was not paid to teach.”

    Or the one where General Sani Abacha hounded NADECO leaders, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for standing up to the extreme human rights abuses of that government.

    In 2024?

    This is 2024, with a government that parades some of the most well-known human rights figures up and down the corridors of power and even among the principal officers of the National Assembly. Where is this ghost of 17th-century England coming from?

    Let me be clear. Protest is not – and should not – be chaos and anarchy. The killing of protesters and police officers during the #EndBadGovernance protests in August, which left seven persons dead, the arson at the NCC building in Kano, the open calls for a military takeover, and the symbolic insinuation that Russian intervention was welcome are inexcusable.

    The silence of some top politicians and leaders, especially from the North, fueled suspicions of complicity if not connivance. Yet, why add a third if two wrongs don’t make a right?

    I don’t know what Intelligence is saying or the briefing President Tinubu is getting. Of course, he needs them. We need them, too, as citizens. No modern state can do without them. But in many countries, their job has become more valuable and sophisticated – and one might even say, often dangerously sophisticated – far beyond the voodoo of Hopkins’ witch-hunt in the east of England.

    Like Aziraphale and Cowley

    For example, for decades in the US, and going back to the Vietnam War, through the Nixon years and the Cold War and even the destabilisation of Libya, the Intelligence services perpetrated some of the vilest acts in pursuit of the so-called enemies of the state, actually a mask for vendetta and a ladder for the ascendancy of the deep state.

    Like the angel Aziraphale and the demon Cowley in Good Omens, the good and bad guys in the security services have shared interests. They routinely collaborate for good and ill, sometimes at the state’s expense.

    Take heed

    Tinubu must take heed. He has a competent Attorney General and Minister of Justice in Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, who should advise him to tread softly. The history of our security services, especially the bad habits inherited from colonial rule and reinforced by the long years of military rule and entitled politicians, hasn’t changed much.

    It’s not the business of police officers, the state security service or special advisers to run the government. That’s not their job. They cannot abridge the people’s freedoms in a quest for ascendancy. Those who breach the law in exercising their liberty should not face the justice that reminds us of Hopkins’ England but a process consistent with modern progressive society, one that Tinubu was voted to uphold.

    As the veteran journalist Owei Lakemfa said in his column last week, the danger is not so much the protesters, their sponsors or the witches in a coven somewhere. The biggest threat to the land is the hardship in plain sight, compounded by the lavish lifestyle of government officials and the lack of clarity about what is next. And the president doesn’t need Witchfinder General Hopkins to tell him.

     

    Azu Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • The journey to Yenagoa, after 19 years – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The journey to Yenagoa, after 19 years – By Azu Ishiekwene

    When I was invited to Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, in June, I didn’t know what to expect. I had not visited the place since 2005. Even though I had been to nearby Rivers and Delta States several times, Bayelsa didn’t cross my mind.

    To make matters worse, the state was often in the news for the wrong reasons. Not that it was an exception, but press headlines seemed to suggest that if you wanted the most depressing news about intra-party wrangling, post-election disputes, or the scariest stuff about kidnapping and youth militancy, Bayelsa was the place to go.

    Bayelsa, the home of Nigeria’s first president from the south-south and one of the jewels of Nigeria’s oil reserve, also appeared to be one of its most volatile spots.

    I didn’t plan to go there. And as if to validate my lethargy, days before this visit, there was something in the news that Bayelsa was the leading state in the prevalence of monkeypox. I kept the news to myself to save my family from panic. It was now looking like a suicide mission.

    To go or not?

    Yet, if Yenagoa was Nigeria’s chaos capital, it didn’t show in the voice of Esueme Dan-Kikile, the general manager corporate affairs of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), who never once wavered in his commitment to me to read my book there.

    When anxiety and prejudice nearly prevailed, I yielded to Dan-Kikile’s reassuring calmness and my nagging curiosity for adventure. 

    After 19 years of mental pictures, mostly from unflattering news reports, I decided to face the demon. By a quirk of fate, I used the longer route – Warri to Yenagoa. What a trip this second missionary journey turned out to be!

    If a picture is worth a thousand words, one travel mile is worth two thousand. Words sometimes fail to describe the joys and excitement of new faces, places, sounds, and smells of travel. 

    Jonathan was “king”

    The last time I visited, former President Goodluck Jonathan was governor. The state was nine years old, and there was only one road in and out of the capital. 

    Bayelsa, located in southern Nigeria, edges the Atlantic Ocean. It was the hotbed of militancy by youths who, sometimes at the behest of politicians, took hostages for ransom and blew up oil and gas pipelines as bargaining chips. Its people are mostly fishermen and farmers whose environment and toils have been ruined for decades by oil spills and the ravages of gas flaring.

    This visit felt different from when I landed at the airport in Warri, Delta State, for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Yenagoa. 

    The East-West Road

    After over N350 billion and 18 years, the construction of the East-West Road, highway to the six states in the Niger Delta region and gateway to the East is still on. They say it would take nearly three times that amount, and God knows how long to finish. 

    This was what Senate President Godswill Akpabio said four years ago when he was Minister of the Niger Delta Affairs – that the road, which NDDC was handling under his supervision, would cost about N1 trillion naira to complete.

    Large portions of it were still impassable as of last week. Where you could drive freely for a mile or two, you had to look out for barricades and sand-filled drums at makeshift checkpoints where the security men and local youths appear to have agreed on a joint approach and a standard extortion formula. 

    “Tollgate ahead, off the mic!”

    If this sounds confusing, you haven’t heard the more confusing part. Extortion doesn’t only happen on the highway. Four years ago, just before Akpabio said the East-West Road might cost N1 trillion to finish, a “tollgate” was mounted for him inside Nigeria’s parliament in Abuja.

    A joint session of Nigeria’s Senate and House of Representatives was conducting an audit of the NDDC, and the Commission had not completed the East-West Road after many years and billions of naira spent. As Akpabio proceeded to open the can of worms after hinting that the contracts for the road were awarded to companies belonging to his interlocutors, the committee chairman and current Minister of Interior Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo interjected: “Off your mic! Honourable Minister, it’s OK, off the mic!”

    That interjection became the national joke for killing any potentially embarrassing thing that should be said. Talking too much is against the convention at any tollgate – whether in Abuja or on the East-West Road. Off the mic, pay the toll, and move.

    Akpabio, an accomplished toll collector, should have known the tradition. According to a NEITI report in 2013, the NDDC received about N400 billion between 2007 and 2011, which is almost one-quarter of its 20-year existence. If the Commission were a state with a revenue of N168 billion in 2011, for example, it would be the sixth highest earning in the country, displaced only by Lagos, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers. 

    Yet, as the car taking me to Yenagoa drove by, the most prevalent evidence that the Commission is working on the East-West Road is the enormous square slabs, each engraved with its name erected shamelessly within every two kilometres or so. It would be a surprise if this work is finished in another 18 years, even if Nigeria robbed a Chinese bank for N1 trillion.

    Waterfront and petrol queues

    After nearly three hours of driving, we finally arrived in Yenagoa, turning off at the Yenagoa-Mbiama part of the East-West Road at Igbogini Junction onto Glory Drive. The driver said the new road was constructed last year. The one-road state capital had a new access road, which I later learned was the third.  

    In Yenagoa, the makeshift food shops on wooden stilts at the waterfront at the end of Alamieyeseigha Road, just a stone’s throw from the imposing Content Board Tower, were great. The food, smell, neon lights, music, and the energy of the solicitous food vendors courting mostly young customers were hard to resist. 

    The place reminded me of Tampa Bay in Florida – if, for a moment, from behind any of the wooden shacks, you looked far beyond the large waterweeds and abandoned wooden canoes at the shore to the Ocean just at the horizon. 

    On our way to the venue of the book reading at Golden Tulip the next day, we saw long queues of vehicles snaking for miles from a nearby NNPC filling station where drivers were waiting to buy petrol. 

    It’s heartbreaking that residents in this state, home of Oloibiri, where crude oil was first discovered in Nigeria and home to the country’s fourth highest concentration of oil wells, must go through this to buy petrol. My driver said drivers unable to buy petrol the same day would leave their vehicles at the station and return the next day. They are used to it. I shook my head.

    Read the book!

    The book reading was electrifying. It was attended by a fine collection of students from four universities in the state with their teachers. Accomplished writers and professionals from other walks of life were present, too. The audience’s enthusiasm and determination to seize the moment for their own good were remarkable. 

    Dan-Kikile spoke from the heart about NCDMB’s passion for upskilling capacity at institutional and individual levels; the moderator, Dr. Doubra Timi-Wood of Channels TV, made the reading a shared moment of intimacy, and the audience loved it. 

    The cure for my lethargy was facing my fears. I’m glad I did. 

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.