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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • Why minimum wage is a bad idea – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Why minimum wage is a bad idea – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I’m opposed to minimum wage. And I know I’m saying this at the risk of losing readers. The minimum wage hurts the poor and vulnerable in whose name and interest Labour claims to strike.

    Sounds foolish, right? How can more naira in the pocket of the Nigerian worker currently on a minimum wage of N30,000 be bad?

    In a country where each of 469 lawmakers earns N13.5 million monthly, minus allowances, and office holders in the executive branch use large convoys and maintain large personal staff at the public expense, why should there be any fuss about the government paying N494,000 monthly as minimum wage to workers?

    Bad example

    The obscenity of public sector waste has been one of the strongest arguments for a new minimum wage. On top of that, there has been the inflationary impact of the adjustments announced last year by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, especially after the removal of the petrol subsidy and efforts to close the arbitrage in the foreign exchange market.

    The argument for minimum wage is that if some folks, especially politicians, have assumed the prerogative of helping themselves to the treasury by ingenious means, what is sauce for the goose must also be sauce for the miserably impoverished gander.

    Yet, a minimum wage is one slippery slope guaranteed to take the gander from economic misery to wretchedness. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell makes the point very clear, and the lives of those who might disagree will bear out the evidence. 

    Wage law trap

    One, minimum wage laws set artificially high wages that can lead to lower employment opportunities, particularly among low-skilled workers. Take Nigeria, for example. Of the estimated 80 million labour force, skills among the largest demographic of this population (those between 25 and 34 years of age) are inferior. 

    A 2022-23 study showed that only one in 10 workers are managers, professionals, technicians, clerical support workers or occupations that require high skill levels. Most need to be better skilled and would be seriously disadvantaged in competing for any opportunity that may attract relatively high wages.

    Remember that the essentially overpaid, underworked, and yet restive public service – whether at the federal, state or local government levels – comprises only a tiny fraction of the workforce. Nearly 90 per cent of Nigeria’s workforce, which may be affected by any artificial wage adjustment, are in the informal sector, that is, outside white-collar jobs. 

    Cutting your nose

    If employers are forced to make hard economic choices about hiring or firing due to artificially fixed wages, the low-skilled and vulnerable ones whose battle Labour claims to be fighting would be the first to go. Minimum wage laws do not necessarily guarantee jobs, yet they make it more expensive to hire or retain low-skilled workers that such laws are supposed to protect.

    Two, minimum wage may lead to further increases in prices. In 1974, when the government of General Yakubu Gowon accepted the Udoji commission report and nearly doubled salaries across the board, taking primary school teachers from N540 to N1,080, for example, price levels skyrocketed, even before the government implemented the new wages in the public sector! It’s convenient to say it won’t get worse until your maize seller or maiguard hears you’re now on a monthly salary of N494k!

    Third, another unintended consequence of minimum wage is that it might reduce job opportunities for young people because employers may be forced to prioritise experience and skills. Also, minimum wage laws could reduce the chances of employment amongst groups, like the physically challenged, for example, who may be perceived to be less productive.  

    Of course, there is the other side – those who argue that if left alone, the typical employer would squeeze the last productive juice from the worker before any wage adjustments. 

    Supporters of this position say that the fair thing to do to reduce income inequality, boost economic growth, reduce labour turnover, and promote social mobility, among other things, is to fix wages. Prominent economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz belong here.

    I don’t. And I have no regrets. Not that I don’t believe that fair is fair. My point is that that is not a lesson the government is competent to teach the market. If an employer – any employer – decides to mistreat its workers, it would only be a matter of time before such an employer would be out of business. In a free market, the skills and talents of the worker will, sooner than later, find better, more rewarding opportunities.

    Other options

    And who says minimum wage laws are the only way to encourage fairness and social mobility in the workforce? Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC), which target low-to-moderate-income earners or a more transparent variety of the Nigerian equivalent – conditional cash transfers (hopefully with a more reliable database) – is another way. Several African countries, including Kenya, South Africa and Ghana, have modified and adopted this system.

    Also, market-indexed wages (here again, Ghana could serve as an example) remove the unending, disruptive cycle of national minimum wage negotiations and strikes. There are other options, including performance-based pay and flexing compensation. 

    Many workplaces today were built on the expensive brick-and-mortar model, which has become too costly and inefficient. Employers could consider flexible work hours or more remote options to reduce commute and overhead costs and encourage moderate wage compensations.

    On whichever side you belong, the consensus among economists is that minimum wage laws increase unemployment among low-skilled workers, a bitter truth that Labour may be unwilling to face. 

    Of course, it’s not only minimum wage that is bad for jobs. Over-regulation concerning capital, high corporate taxes and levies, poor infrastructure and bureaucratic hurdles to contract enforcement are also bad for jobs, businesses, and workers. 

    Thatcher way

    I don’t like Magaret Thatcher, primarily for her duplicity over apartheid. But she gets full credit in my books for saving Britain from the wild strikes of wild unions that brought the country to its knees. 

    Of course, it’s also fair to say that, unlike Nigerian governments, Thatcher did not break workers’ eggs to make her omelettes. She was not for the turning in her determination to free the economy from the shackles of unions and in her government’s example of austere living. 

    Yet today, Britain appears to be losing its competitive business edge. Partly a result of the resurgence of the unions and right-wing rhetoric, it falls among countries which have been worst for income in the last 15 years, with incomes across the board growing by just six per cent since 2009, making it a laughing stock among countries in its league. 

    Half-full

    Nigeria is not listed among countries with the slowest wage growth at least in the last 15 years, a list which includes countries like South Sudan, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Malawi and so on. Apart from bureaucracy and corruption, the main challenge for Nigeria has been the tendency, especially among states, the main power blocs, to prioritise rent and politics over creativity and competition. 

    The strikes and disruptions over wages are not funny at all. In the cauldron of Nigeria’s post-election politics, this may look, smell, and even feel like a continuation of the war by other means. But in the end, we all pay a price. And you know what? The serious world doesn’t care. It is moving on!

     

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

  • The pathologies of a throne – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The pathologies of a throne – By Azu Ishiekwene

    For the deposed Kano Emir, Aminu Bayero, it was not a matter of if but when. The moment the Supreme Court upheld Governor Abba Yusuf’s election in January, Bayero knew the governor would need the throne to pay his debt. 

    During the campaign, the governor promised that if he were elected, he would revoke the sharing of the Kano Municipal Emirate between two Bayeros among the four new emirs and restore the throne’s singular pre-eminence.

    Of course, he won. But before the ruling of the Supreme Court in January affirming his election, two lower courts had ruled in favour of the APC candidate, increasing the probability that Yusuf might not get it.

    But Yusuf defied the trend and got it. Since then, Aminu Ado Bayero has taken his case to virtually all notable traditional rulers in the country, begging them to beg President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to save him. His last visit was to the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikuru Adetona. Neither the Awujale, the Sultan, nor any other traditional rulers he had visited could help.

    The throne would be used to pay a debt foretold.

    Nearly there 

    But the re-instated Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, is not sitting pretty yet. Not even one side of his royal buttocks is hugging the throne in the main palace yet. He’s currently in a holding room, besieged by orders and counter-court orders about what should happen next.

    A young man genuinely surprised by the drama in Kano asked what the fuss was about. Why should the country almost come to grief over who of two cousins – with ties and friendships that run deep – would become the emir? It’s a fair point. 

    There was a time in this country when the business of chiefs, obas, emirs—or any traditional rulers, by whatever description or name—was the concern of local governments.

    How they were appointed, kept or removed was local. Their relevance or longevity depended mainly on how their communities perceived their compliance with the customs and traditions. 

    Burden of a legacy 

    Colonial rule exploited and undermined the system. However, the more significant damage was inflicted by the long years of military rule, which emasculated the states and local governments through a centralised system of administration that left the units bereft. Successive politicians have only paid lip service to federalism.

    After the civil war and the national trauma that followed it, the military recruited traditional rulers, amongst others, to help heal the country and deepen their own legitimacy. They courted the institutions, propped them up, and invested them with responsibilities that made them more prestigious, prominent, and powerful.

    A number of soldiers, especially from the North, where the traditional institution had grown from colonial rule to become something of a vital centre of political and religious authority, soon took traditional titles to reinvent and perpetuate their control, complete with the feudal and anachronistic levers of power.

    Game of Thrones pro-max

    A young man born into a modern world of merit, innovation and competence is right to question the sense in a country that advertises itself as a republic but is still obsessing over a wayward, neo-medieval concept called monarchy. The only thing that imitates what is happening in Kano is the fantasy TV series, “Game of Thrones”, based on George R. R. Martin’s book, A Song of Ice and Fire.

    But that’s precisely the point about the pathology of the monarchy. Throne rule may be extinct in France and parts of Europe where monarchs paid for feudalism with their heads hoisted on spikes by wild mobs or it may be seriously challenged in a few remaining bastions like Britain, but the drama, the complex themes of power, loyalty and betrayal, remains a reality of our daily existence. That’s why Kano obsesses.

    Powers behind the throne 

    Sanusi and Bayero fancy themselves as the centre of the drama. They’re not. Both men and their supporters are grist in a vast and complex power mill grinding through the heart of the politics of 2027 and beyond in the North. Whoever wins now will still yield the throne to pay a future debt.

    It’s not Sanusi v Bayero. Or some karmic payback either way. It’s the leader of the NNPP Rabiu Kwankwaso v Abdullahi Ganduje and a few key members of President Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s cabinet who want to lead the North in 2027. 

    One insider described what is happening as a “skirmish”, insisting that the battle, which obviously consumed former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai, is only just beginning.

    Coming war

    After President Muhammdu Buhari’s catastrophic tenure and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s serial futile attempts at taking the presidency, the North has been asking itself if this is indeed the best it can offer. That soul-searching is at the heart of the jostling to produce credible leadership that can rally the region, if not for the next four years, then certainly for the next general election cycle.

    In this coming battle, any potential contender who shows his hand early on may not be politically alive to tell the story. But that will not stop politicians from trying to succeed where El-Rufai was ambushed.

    Kwankwaso is one such politician. With the victory at the governorship polls, he regained his political footing in Kano, the largest vote bank in the North-West, where his successor betrayed him. He has been trying, without much success, so far, to trash Ganduje, the chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). 

    What Kwankwaso may need to reinforce his grip as the potential pre-eminent political leader in the North, is to secure control of the Kano emirate. Whether given Sanusi’s own volatile history Kwankwaso would find him serviceable in this task is another matter. What is clear is that of the two devils, one is preferred.

    Once the emirate is settled, Kwankwaso will return to the immediate task of worming his way into the ruling party. Why would he prefer the ruling party to the prospects of a mega-merger of PDP, LP and others? Because it’s a joke that offers no serious pathway to power, and those mooting the idea know it. Kwankwaso, too, knows it.

    Why this skirmish matters 

    But he also knows that the only thing more combustible than having FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and Rivers State Governor Simi Fubara in one room is having Kwankwaso and Ganduje in one room. The combatants, with the referee and spectators, are guaranteed a bloody ending. That’s why, after lining his political and monarchical ducks in a row, Kwankwaso’s next stop is Abuja.

    Ganduje knows that this is a fight for his political life. And even though forces around the president detest Ganduje, they are united on the matter of blocking any potential leader from the North who is currently outside Tinubu’s inner circle. There’s no guarantee they would succeed but they won’t fail for lack of effort.

    As it was in the “Game of Thrones”, expect more surprises, more twists and turns, more convenient alliances, treachery and betrayals. The monarchy may be damaging itself either from within or from outside pressure, but the lessons it teaches about power, about its absolutism and ephemerality, remain for all who have eyes to see.

  • One year of Tinubu – By Azu Ishiekwene

    One year of Tinubu – By Azu Ishiekwene

    It wasn’t five months after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu took office when folks started asking, how far? In middle class and elite social circles in Nigeria, that question, or its variant – how market? – is often reserved for people whose sympathy for a cause or person is imperiled.

    I often pushed back by saying that given the enormity of problems that the Tinubu government faced at inception, five months or so were inadequate to judge. And that was not just a convenient deflection. 

    There are, of course, American presidents who made a mark after 100 days in office, notably, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama. But you don’t make them often, whatever may be the fetish of 100 days in office popularised by the U.S. After all President Clinton had a rocky 100 days in office only to end up the first Democratic president to be elected to two full terms after Roosevelt.

    Unusual election

    Nigeria’s 2023 election was so contentious that even though voting ended in February and a president was announced almost immediately by the electoral commission, it wasn’t until eight months later that the Supreme Court finally upheld his election. Tinubu was, as we say, hugging the chair with just one side of his buttocks. Of course, he had taken decisions from day one for which he must be held accountable, even if he was hanging on by a thread.

    Perhaps the most consequential was his announcement, adlib, that “fuel subsidy is gone.” The removal was overdue. A good number of people agreed, even though some opposed the precipitous announcement and the subsequent merger of the exchange rate as evidence of Tinubu’s overzealous attempt to please the IMF and World Bank. It might also have been an honest attempt by him to preempt being taken hostage by the bureaucracy. 

    Whatever the motivation was, it backfired; not because of the announcement, but because the government seemed totally unprepared to manage the fallout. There was, strictly speaking, no government to speak of at the time. The chaos that followed the announcement piled on the chaos that Tinubu met in office.

    Buhari did nothing?

    It would be unfair to say that Tinubu’s predecessor and fellow partyman, President Muhammadu Buhari, did nothing in eight years. The problem was that those who installed Buhari, chief among whom was Tinubu, and those who thought he could do the job, including myself, were unfair to Buhari. He wasn’t up to the job, but we didn’t care. In his incompetence, he put Nigerians through shege and left behind for his successor a legacy of shege banza, if you’ll excuse my French.

    The fallouts of COVID-19 and the supply chain problems off the back of the war in Ukraine made things tough for Buhari. But what has come to light even from the management of these crises was his absence most of the time. He loved his title far more than he understood his job.

    Perfect storm

    His successor descended into a perfect storm: inflation at nearly 22 percent; unemployment at 33 percent; foreign exchange scarcity and declining revenue from oil sales; a looming debt crisis; a population surging ahead of GDP; an inefficient, lopsided and bloated public service; rampant insecurity; and broken confidence in government. Don’t even add the dysfunctional relationship between the fiscal and monetary authorities. 

    In the last four political transitions since 1999, the Buhari-Tinubu transition has been the most fraught, incomparable in hazard with the one between President Goodluck Jonathan and Buhari in 2015, which was supposed to have been a hostile takeover.  Yet, the Buhari-Tinubu transition was a handover from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to itself.

    Tinubu’s cross

    But Tinubu has to be judged by what he has done or failed to do, especially since he has said, repeatedly, that he asked for the job and would not invite any pity party. It was not Buhari’s fault, for example, that he couldn’t form a cabinet until 56 days after taking office. 

    Nor was Buhari to blame that when Tinubu finally composed his team, he selected, with a few exceptions, mostly people whose major credential was that they knew someone who knew someone who knew the president. The drama around some of the appointments and the screening are a subject on their own. That had nothing to do with Buhari.

    The rot was deep. But the treatment – the radical attempts to scrap market curbs and tighten fiscal and monetary controls – appears, for now, worse than the disease, leaving large sections of the population struggling and impoverished. 

    The compound chaos was neither entirely unforeseen nor inevitable. Buhari left behind a near-bankrupt treasury and ran his government for the most part by printing money. Getting the economy back into gear was going to depend largely on the unpredictable receipts from oil sales, which in turn was going to depend on less oil theft and a higher production quota. Foreign investors’ confidence had also been undermined by excessive price controls; while on the domestic front, rampant insecurity kept food prices high. 

    Approach matters

    A far more careful calibration and better management of public expectations than Tinubu’s government’s zeal suggested might have produced a different outcome. Unfortunately, a lifetime’s worth of suffering appears to have been laid out in a terrifically short time.

    Yet, while some of it is inevitable, a few of the problems of the past year have been fostered by vested interests determined to complicate the government’s misery. Take two examples: the pushback by currency manipulators, and the organised crime in Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs).

    In the first case, it is difficult to know who was the more complicit – the commercial banks (often in cahoots with state governors) or black-market operators. The incestuous relationship between the two, aided and abetted for years by the Central Bank, fed off cheap government funds, producing an army of white-collar criminals who became multimillionaires by exploiting multiple trading windows. 

    Our monkey worked for their baboon to chop. Once Tinubu’s government said enough, the manipulators and their crypto ground soldiers launched a blistering counter-attack. The fight is still on.

    The second main war has been with the demon within, elegantly called the MDAs. A source told me not too long ago that some of these government agencies, particularly NPA and NIMASA, among others, illegally locked down about $3.8 billion, from receipts. While they lied and lied that there was no “cash backing” for capital projects, they withheld forex remittances to the Central Bank and also cut deals with bank officials to roll over the principal sums, as they creamed off the interest. 

    Tinubu’s searchlight in these places has unleashed a firestorm from vested interests, now aligned with sections of the political class to paint his government in the worst light possible. 

    Gift of exaggeration

    The problems of Tinubu’s government in the last one year have been partly self-inflicted, and partly unavoidable. But the criticism of his government as a disaster, mostly by politicians who can’t wait for the next general elections in 2027, is exaggerated. 

    If ongoing structural reforms are paced, oil production quota keeps trending up, and the government leads by example, finding disciplined ways to manage the impact of tighter monetary controls on the cost of funds, things might yet look up sooner than later. 

    It’s doubtful that any of those who vied with him for the presidency could have done better, whatever they might say from their easy chair. What Tinubu still has going for him are his courage, foresight and staying power. Now, he has a shorter runway to make them produce concrete results in the lives of citizens.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Who does America listen to? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Who does America listen to? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I was chatting with a friend last week, who, mid-speech, redirected our conversation to the situation in the Middle East. She wanted to know what the mood in the US was. Over 6,000 miles away in Nigeria from where she was calling, she didn’t quite trust the media accounts. Since I was visiting the US, she thought I might have a better reading of the pulse.

    Her call coincided with the decision by Israeli President, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a ground offensive in Rafah, in spite of warnings about compounding the current humanitarian disaster in Gaza where over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, not counting bodies still under the rubble.

    No one is sure how many more dead would be counted before Netanyahu finds the last Hamas, but is there still a chance – just one chance – that the dog in this deadly hunt will hear the hunter’s restraining whistle? Is the US unable or unwilling or both unable and unwilling to call Netanyahu to stop?

    Calling America

    I told the caller that the honest answer was I don’t know. The mood on US campuses was clear. Students from Columbia to Yale and from Harvard to New York and University of Texas at Austin, pitched tents outside for days in running battles with the police to demand an end to the war. They wanted the Biden administration to call Netanyahu to order. 

    There were counter-protests, alright, but the overwhelming majority of students across US college campuses made their voices loud and clear: Israel had gone too far in avenging October 7. 

    That was the mood on the campuses. 

    It wasn’t very different on the streets, too. You could say that is to be expected. Two of three cab drivers I used were persons with Arab roots who wore their grief on their sleeves. 

    They were not all Hamas sympathisers; just ordinary folks who might still have remained in Palestine under better leadership, but in whose eyes the worst Palestine leaders now look like saints, thanks to Israel’s ruthless war in Gaza. But you don’t have to be Arab or Jew or Greek to ask, who can stop Netanyahu? You just have to be human to see that if two wrongs don’t make a right, a third only compounds it.

    So, who does the US listen to and why does it matter in the war in Gaza? In politico-speak those who move the hand that moves the most powerful country in the world are called the “military-industrial complex.” 

    Who’s the Complex?

    This is how Meta AI defines it: “The military-industrial complex (MIC) refers to the interconnected network of relationships between the military, defense contractors, and the federal government. It involves the collaboration and cooperation between these entities to produce and profit from military weapons, equipment and services.

    “The term was first used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961, where he warned of the potential dangers of an unchecked alliance between the military, defence contractors and politicians.”

    If there’s anyone who ought to know that a threesome involving the military, defence contractors and politicians can hardly end in any good, it was Eisenhower. He was on two of the three sides; and Dick Cheney who became Vice President decades later, was on the last two – defence contractor and politician. 

    Eisenhower led two of the most consequential military campaigns in the Second World War, before he later became president.

    This Complex is not large. In number terms, it would be a tiny fraction of the number of college students who besieged dozens of campuses last week, calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Statistics in 2009 suggested that it includes around 1,100 lobbyists who represent about 400 clients from the defence sector, mostly companies that make losses from peace.  

    Size matters not

    But you would be mistaken to judge its influence by its size. Although it accounted for about three percent of the US GDP two years ago, these folks famous mostly for their notorious exploits, with strong ties to the Jewish lobby, have been linked with nearly every bad thing from the overthrow and murder of radical Chilean president Salvadore Allende Gossens to the Vietnam War and from the Iran-Contra Affair to Gulf War I & II. 

    As bad things go, the last one was the baddest. This Complex instigated the US invasion of Iraq in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It made up its own convenient evidence, bomb after bomb, as hundreds of lives were destroyed and centuries of civilisation in Mesopotamia was pillaged and ruined.

    After the war, one of the last surviving White House peaceniks, Barack Obama, said, in a declassified document: “ISIS (Islamic State), is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion, which is an example of unintended consequences – which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.” Unfortunately, even Obama the Dove shot before aiming in Libya.

    In the Middle East, the Complex has President Biden by the balls. That was what I told the caller from Nigeria. It doesn’t matter what the students are saying on college campuses or what the cab drivers think; the Complex has Biden by the balls. And what a hold they have on him and on anyone in the White House in an election year! The Complex has got Israel’s back. Biden is damned if he calls out Netanyahu. Damned if he doesn’t. 

    Owners of America

    That’s what I told the caller. The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria have a profound way of saying it that is lacking in the English language: “Ana enwe obodo enwe!” A town is owned and the owners call the shots. It’s a hard thing to say, even harder, perhaps, to accept. Because the logic of accepting that the Complex owns America and has its ear, is to deny the agency of actors within the system who may hold different, even stridently opposing views.

    But think of it this way: why would America, a beacon of the rule of law, conveniently hide under its non-signatory status to ICJ to allow Israel to continue bombarding Gaza in spite of warnings by the court and the UN of an impending humanitarian catastrophe? Why would Biden, who regretted voting for the War in Iraq, and who as President, has prioritised diplomacy, become so impotent over Gaza? It’s the Complex, folks! They’ve got him by the balls in an election year!

    And Netanyahu knows this, as does large sections of the Western media largely controlled by vested interests in the Middle East conflict. Netanyahu knows that Israel’s invincibility is an American yarn. The students said that much in their placards and graffiti last week, but who’s listening? 

    Certainly not Biden, who along with his British ally, Rishi Sunak, scrambled military assets to defend Israel on April 15, when Iran launched what might otherwise have been a devastating retaliatory attack on Israel? The yarn of Israel’s invincibility, largely overplayed in the Western media, continues to feed the war. For how long? How many more lives before enough is enough?

    What price, peace?

    On the whole, the world is in a far more peaceful place today than it was in the 20th century when millions of people died from senseless, bloody conflicts over ego and territory. Yet, it has taken bloody hard work to bring us here, where prosperity is not only measured by the Complex’s profit from wars, but also by how many ordinary folks around the world have bread on their table and milk for their babies.

    Now, it seems like from South Sudan to Yemen and from the meat grinder in Ukraine to Gaza, the world is adrift again, one war at a time, as America defies the voices of its own children.

    Someone must stop, listen and act. If not Biden, then who?

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Thrills, joys and surprises of selling – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Thrills, joys and surprises of selling – By Azu Ishiekwene

    There are probably more books on how to sell everything than there is sand by the seashore. I have read a few myself and might say that when it comes to selling, even though what you have read might help, nothing teaches like what you learn by doing it. 

    For some, selling feels natural. I cannot remember how many times I have bought stuff that I really didn’t need because the seller made me feel like they were offering the moon on a stick. Good for those who have such skills but when it comes to selling, I’m far from a natural. I overthink, over-analyse and take failure to deliver rather personal – all perfect signs of a poor salesman.

    Even after giving it my best shot, I linger on the matter, beating myself over the head about how I might have done better. That was probably why my first book, The trial of Nuhu Ribadu: A riveting story of Nigeria’s anti-Corruption war was not a commercial success, even though I closed it believing that recording that important phase of Nigeria’s life was more important than commercial success.

    When I set out to write my second book, however, a couple of things had changed. Not the textbook principles of selling such as – place, product, promotions, price or physical presence. Sixteen years ago, when that first book was released, the Internet and social media were in their infancy. That has changed. 

    Thinking of writing?

    And just as important, I cannot be thinking of writing a book about monetising content, without thinking about how the book will reward my effort, and of course, also inspire young writers. If that was ever going to happen, I needed to be intentional – and even if I fail, fail intentionally. 

    Being intentional meant digging a bit more beforehand to find the best combination of theory and practice. Given that social media was going to play a vital role in the effort, a digital migrant like me also needed to immerse a bit more in the cauldron where for many years I was more than happy to have just one toe in.

    A group of closet experts – Adeyeye Joseph, Freeman Oloruntoba, Emeke Ishiekwene, Wilson Onwuka, Sam Ossai and Ololade Bamidele – prepped me for weeks on the perils and promises of riding a digital highway riddled with avatars and the armours I must always remember. On this road, it’s not enough to look left, right and left again, as your mother taught you. Timing, form, medium and message are just as important. Plus remembering all the time that the vocabulary in your standard English dictionary may have gone stale!

    KK’s fan base rule 

    I must also share something from an article by Kevin Kelly updated in Tim Ferriss’ book, Tools of Titans. Kelly’s principle of 1,000 true fans says that a true fan is someone who will buy anything and everything you produce. This rule of true fans says that to be a successful creator, you don’t need millions. Not millions of dollars or millions of clients or millions of customers.

    If you’re happy to make a living, and not a fortune, you need just 1k true fans who will climb any mountain, cross any river, and jump any hurdle to buy a minimum quantity of what you have produced over a period of time. With the over 3k contacts on my phone, I had to decide who among them could be superfans. 

    King’s exceptionalism 

    But a part of me also kept going to Stephen King. I don’t know what it was, whether it was genius or serendipity. But when he made his break there was neither Facebook nor X. There was no Instagram or LinkedIn. He was, quite frankly, an unknown; a man of promise and a good husband no doubt, but nevertheless an unknown part-time teacher and writer, hoping for a break someday. He didn’t have a community outside his family of his wife and three children, never mind a fanbase of 1k.

    And then he produced Carrie, a book he totally didn’t expect much from when he mailed the manuscript to Doubleday, his publisher, that later passed the paperback rights to Signet Books. He was in his kitchen one day, long after the manuscript had been sent when he got a call from Doubleday that nearly knocked him off his chair. The book, which he would have been delirious to get only $30k from, had just fetched him $400k!

    Genius or luck? 

    Don’t ask me what that was. Genius, serendipity or a good mix of both. But there you have it! No true fans, no social media, no promotions. Yet, boom! It happened.

    You’re right. You don’t get a King every time. And so, I took my fate in my own hands hoping to put into play in the sale of Writing for Media and Monetising It, everything I have learnt about selling, from selling charcoal for my mother many years ago to selling newspapers for the past over 35 years I’ve been a journalist.

    My experience in the past three weeks since Premium Times Books released my book has been funny, thrilling, with not a few surprises – and yet these are early days. Last week, I shared the concerns of one of the journalism’s icons and publisher of Vanguard, Sam Amuka, fondly called Uncle Sam, about how to get people to read the book. 

    Not an easy one but I’m hoping that sharing how folks can be rewarded – in a clear, relatable way – while they’re doing what they enjoy doing, might interest more than a few regular folks enough to read. I hope I’m right.

    My ‘fan-mail’ 

    If social media feedback were convertible – and there have been quite a number of heartfelt ones – then King might well be prepared for a good chase. Are you laughing, as I suspect?

    But seriously, there have also been a few rather curious feedback. One follower – I’m not sure whether to classify him as super, lightweight or just a passerby – sent a message congratulating me profusely for the book. I was naturally hoping the next thing he would ask was how or where he would buy a copy, to which I would have directed him to: www.azu.media. But no. He simply said, “Great one, Azu. Send me a copy!”

    That put me on the spot, but not for long. After mulling how to respond, I said, “Thank you, Sir.” To which he responded with the meme of hands clasped in prayer. End of story!

    Another one was more social. Amidst a video thread of greetings and wishes for commercial success, this follower simply said, “My own na you look good…brains plus charms…hmm.” To which I responded with the meme of hands clasped in prayers. Or what?

    I know it’s still a long road to June 26 when the book will be publicly presented, but with followers like Brains Plus Charms, you’d better not rule out a Carrie story. Writing for Media and Monetising It, may not be a work of fiction like King’s Carrie, but it was invested with no less heart, passion and planning. The rest, perhaps, is a matter of luck!

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • What’s in a book? You’ll never know, until… – By Azu Ishiekwene

    What’s in a book? You’ll never know, until… – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Earlier this week, I teased on my social handle about my encounter with a deity. Of course, not in the sense that one might meet a deity in the groove of a village forest.

    Yet, those who have met this man – who know him – might agree that Sam Amuka, fondly called Uncle Sam, is a deity of sorts. The trail that forged the seasons of his career goes back many decades to his years at Daily Times which at its prime, was Africa’s leading journalism shrine.

    On Sunday I went to see Uncle Sam, to talk about my new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It. I had dispatched a copy to him in advance, but the ritual would be incomplete without a libation.

    So, I took along an extra copy and went to his Anthony Lagos residence, where he has lived like a regular Joe for many decades. As I waited for him upstairs on the balcony of his house, I glanced back and forth between the Sunday newspapers strewn on a cane table, and a silver tray with a big flask, teacups, a box of Lipton and assorted teas, a bottle of honey, skimmed milk and over a dozen of packets of Kemps cracker biscuits. 

    It wasn’t long before Uncle Sam emerged from the corridor, his imminent presence announced by the barking of a puddle that first accosted me when I climbed the stairs. The puddle was not here when I visited a few years ago.

    “Superstar!” Uncle Sam teased, as he came out.

    I replied, smiling, that 88 was good on him. He corrected me: “I’m 89!” He then tore a packet of Kemps crackers and sat on the bed-shaped cane chair to my right, waiving the young man who had followed behind to make him some tea. 

    The young man took out two Lipton tea bags, and after pouring hot water from the flask went on to add not one or two, but I think three teaspoons of honey. Then, he grabbed the tin of skimmed milk. I looked at Uncle Sam, thinking the young man was mistaken and expecting he would ask him to stop. He didn’t. Instead, he looked approvingly, even expectantly, munching his Kemps.

    At 59, in my obsession to live a long, healthy life, only God knows how many things I have given up. I can’t remember the last time I used any sweetener, gluten-free or not, for my tea or pap, much less milk. I was puzzled to see an 89-year-old man having his tea not just with plenty of honey but also topping the brew with spoonsful of milk. 

    Uncle Sam smiled as he took the steaming teacup from the young man, stirred it gently, and took a sip. As if to create the perfect ambience for his refreshment, he turned on music stored in a flash drive that was plugged into a player. 

    “You don’t know I’m called Daddy DJ?” he joked in response to my puzzled look.

    Sam Amuka, I know. Uncle Sam, I know. Who doesn’t? He is the Jimmy Breslin of Nigeria’s journalism. Writing about Breslin, who died seven years ago at 88, Tom Wolfe described him as, “The greatest columnist of my era.” And that, from Wolfe, a master of the craft in his own right, says a lot. 

    In a tribute to Breslin, The Guardian wrote that he was the champion of the trials and troubles of the ordinary people in New York. “He filled his columns with gangsters and thieves, whom he knew first-hand from drinking in the same bars. He told stories that smacked of blarney behind their anger.”

    And Breslin himself once said, “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing for newspapers.” That was Sad Sam, the tempered version of which we now know as “Uncle Sam.”

    But “Daddy DJ?” I was meeting him in that incarnation for the first time this Sunday morning. Yet, it made no difference. I could see a common thread of empathy and humanity binding the three persons in one man. I was happy and comfortable to share the story of my new book, in-between sips of my own tea – sugarless, milk-less – and yes, also in-between mouthfuls of Kemps cracker biscuits which I had not tasted for a very long time.

    I did not start out to write a self-help book. As my career as a journalist crossed the 35-year mark and I inch closer to the sixth floor of life, it became increasingly difficult to ignore suggestions to share my experience in a more permanent form. I’ve been writing for the media since I was 22 and even managed to write a book on Nigeria’s anti-corruption war in 2008. But the urge to share more has increased. 

    In yielding, I wondered what I could do differently. In recent times, I have been invited by universities and professional groups to speak on the challenges facing journalists and young writers, especially in light of the extraordinary explosion in the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, at school and at home. 

    Decades after TIME magazine famously predicted that journalism could be on its death throes and it turned out that the death was exaggerated, the technology appears to have sparked the second panic wave. 

    So what? I thought perhaps it might be useful to combine my speaking experiences with decades of writing a weekly column now enriched in both audio and visual formats to serve the needs of a younger generation of content providers, especially students and those in the earlier stages of their writing career, trying to find their way. And not just trying to find their way – but also, trying to earn some extra money or attract value, while doing so.

    The book title clearly suggests a media bias – media here meaning traditional and social media. That is deliberate as audiences in these areas are my primary focus. Whether you are still in school, just starting out on a writing career path or are, in fact, in the middle levels of your career, you would find this book useful. 

    It draws not only on my personal experience – struggles and triumphs – I also interviewed professionals across age brackets who generously shared their experiences with me.

    For me, writing this was like walking back through the years of my career, beginning from when there was even no career but just the dream to become a writer someday, to my schools when I was formally introduced to the craft, through many changes along the way, a good number of which I didn’t even see coming. 

    You don’t have to wear my shoes or tread my path. But this book is a good guide for common obstacles many literary content providers face in the new world as they try to find their own way.  

    I set out to do an online course largely on journalistic writing for value, not to write a book, but ended up with a resource that will benefit a much larger variety of audiences than I had envisaged. 

    Uncle Sam listened patiently. When I finished, he asked one question, with a worried look: “How will you get this book out, and get people to read it?”

    No easy answer. Research increasingly suggests declining interest in reading, especially among younger populations. I replied that I did what I could to make the book simple, anecdotal and relatable. 

    “I’m hoping,” I told Uncle Sam, “that young people would see something of themselves in my stories and the stories of others across a generational spectrum and from it, chart their own course.” 

    He didn’t seem fully persuaded, but he was in earnest for me – for us – to find a way. 

    How can one claim to be a journalist, for example, without reading Peter Enahoro’s You’ve Gotta Cry to Laugh, Babatunde Jose’s Walking a Tightrope or Alade Odunewu’s Allah De? Or even the more recent Battlelines: Adventures in Journalism and Politics by Olusegun Osoba, to mention a few?

    What is in a book is the thing that might just change your life; but you’ll have to read it to find it. On that, deities whether in journalism, carpentry, medicine or the good old craft of fortune-telling, might agree.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Musings on parties in turmoil – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Musings on parties in turmoil – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Nigeria’s three main political parties – the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the Labour Party (LP) – are in turmoil. They have been infested by little foxes that threaten to damage and, potentially, destroy them.

    I know that discipline is not a virtue of political parties in a presidential system. In Nigeria’s own version, however, indiscipline governs everything. 

    Whether the political parties are winning or losing – of course, it is worse when they’re losing – politicians never forget that the party is simply a convenient tool, serviceable only when it can help them get to power, but certainly dispensable immediately afterwards.

    See what is happening in the PDP, the party which lost its way after 16 years in power. The same forces led by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar that snatched defeat, not once, from the jaws of victory, are still determined to bury what is left of the sick party alive.

    To be fair, Abubakar has paid his dues. He has done so with the generosity of a rolling stone, gathering moss from PDP to the Action Congress of Nigeria (AC), then to n-PDP, and from there to APC, and back again to PDP. At each point, never failing to leave a mark in pursuit of the prophecy of a marabout about 26 years ago that he would one day become Nigeria’s president.

    Ambition, what price?

    Ambition is not a crime. For a man of Abubakar’s political accomplishments, however, not knowing when to stop is a bad thing. He not only abandoned the PDP for years, he worked against it openly by running against the party as the AC presidential candidate in 2007. It was bad enough for him to abandon the PDP and return to it to fight for a presidential ticket at a most ill-advised and inauspicious time.

    But what is worse was for him to take a front-row seat at the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting in Abuja last week, plotting if not to run again as president, then to decide who runs the party. While this was happening, one of the party’s altar boys, Emeka Ihedioha, was resigning with a heavy heart from the PDP, perhaps casting one eye at his grandfather, Abubakar, the remaining dinosaur among the founding fathers present at the Abuja NEC meeting.

    It was one meeting Abubakar should not have attended – or if it was inevitable, he should have come at least shedding crocodile tears in remorse for his role in how the party snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2023 general elections. But he came, as we say, with his full chest.

    Accuser and accused 

    I looked at the press photos from the event twice to believe he was actually the one sitting there in the front row at the NEC meeting. As if that was not heartbreaking enough, some folks – governors/landlords of the party –lined up behind him, asking not for him to account, but that the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, who sustained the party while Abubakar was in exile, should be disciplined for “anti-party activities.”

    Wike has his problems, but they do not include political prostitution. Or trashing the party’s constitution (as Abubakar did) which clearly provided that it was not the North’s turn to field a presidential candidate. When will the PDP learn?

    Humpty Dumpty

    I’m told that after separate meetings with Abubakar and Wike by the PDP governors (four of whom appear to be leaning towards Abubakar, seven for Wike and two undecided) the party is considering setting up a reconciliation committee headed by former Senate President Bukola Saraki, to mend Humpty Dumpty.

    I wish Saraki luck in his task of doing what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have failed to do. But as surely as six follows seven, the record of all known attempts to settle intra-party conflicts by indulging the hubris of the instigator have ended in futility. There’s not much time left before the party’s congresses in June and all the drama at the Abuja NEC was about control of the party ahead of that congress. 

    With Umar Damagum still in the chair as acting Chairman – the last thing that Abubakar wanted before the NEC meeting – the former vice president’s grip is more tenuous than it ever was and his relevance in decline.

    Proxy wars 

    The PDP can, however, take comfort that it’s not alone in keeping the foxes out of its garden. Even the ruling APC and Labour are having torrid times of their own. APC Chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje, has been fending off petitions and attacks from his state, Kano, by persons who not only want him out, but also want him tried on charges ranging from bribery to diversion of funds, misappropriation and criminal breach of trust.

    What is happening in Kano is a continuation by other means of the long-running war between NNPP leader, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and his former deputy-turned-adversary, Ganduje. Of course, APC members in Ganduje’s Kano ward are being used against him in this proxy war, but his real foe is Kwankwaso. 

    There has been talk of party members in the North Central eyeing Ganduje’s chair. But party insiders insist that the main issues remain the potential return of Kwankwaso to the APC and who between him and Ganduje has more strategic value for 2027. 

    Musical chairs 

    Party chairmanship is perhaps the ficklest of positions. Ganduje is the sixth APC chairman in 10 years and three national election cycles, while its older cousin, the PDP, has produced 18 in 25 years, with only two – Barnabas Gemade and Ahmadu Ali – completing their tenure. Even Labour, just one-year-old, cannot keep one chairman safe.

    Ganduje knows he is on a hot seat, held only at the pleasure of the president, as we have seen from the days of President Olusegun Obasanjo. Changing Ganduje is hardly President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s problem. His headache is whether with the North’s growing unease about his administration, he can find someone else to replace Ganduje that he can trust. 

    Tinubu can also hardly ignore the anti-Nasir El-Rufai stirrings in Kaduna, which not a few have suggested may have been instigated by Abuja. There’s a double imperative for Tinubu first to secure Kano, the North West’s vote bank; and also, to keep El-Rufai, an influential politician in the region, on a leash. The jury is out on who, between Kwankwaso and Ganduje, would be the better battering ram.

    The leper and the milk 

    The party chairman is like a leper. He may not be able to drink the milk that nourishes his appointor’s position, but he sure can spill it. And the perfect fit, often, is someone with something around their neck, which if they ever forget, can be used to constantly remind them of their vulnerability. Since Kwankwaso and Ganduje cannot possibly sit in a room without a referee in protective gear, a middle ground is out of the question. Tinubu will have to choose who to work with between the two. 

    While he is at it, party administration will continue to drift and Ganduje’s authority will continue to ebb. 

    Labour in vain 

    But again, this is not significantly different from what is happening in Labour, where two factions of the party – one headed by Julius Abure and the other by Lamidi Apapa – have brought the party to its knees, raising speculations of the possible exit of the party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi.

    With the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) taking a stand against Abure and splitting the party’s executive right down the middle, it won’t be long before Obi decides whether he can save this ship or risk drowning with it.

    The moment of decision for the parties may seem far off, if you count three years until the next general elections. But in politics it is not the years before the next election that count; it is the events that shape those years. And those events are lining up at a speed that suggests that if the campaign for 2027 has not started already, it might be upon us sooner than later.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Is a Third World War coming? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Is a Third World War coming? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    This was the question a friend of mine in his late 20s asked me when we woke up on April 14 to the news that Iran had launched over 300 drones and missiles towards Israel.

    Apart from video war games, the young man has not seen any wars. Nigeria’s civil war ended nearly two and a half decades before he was born. Of course, you don’t have to experience war to feel it. There’s a sense, for example, in which the more recent wars in the West African subregion or the more distant ones in Northeastern Africa or Europe tend to reach us, wherever we are. 

    Our televisions and phones bring the horrors of war right into our living rooms. A generation for which these smart devices have become a playground is right to be concerned that the flare-up in the Middle East could lead to something more serious. 

    Apart from the war in Ukraine and the underreported conflicts in South Sudan and Central Africa, no other war in recent times has riveted the world like the one in Gaza. For all the talk about the potential escalation into a wider regional conflict, it didn’t seem likely that the Israeli-Palestinian war would spread beyond shadow attacks by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, until Israeli air strike killed seven Iranians in the Iranian Embassy in Damascus and six Syrians.

    An unusual response

    That was when the threat of escalation became real. Not even during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, did Iran, a regional power, take a direct aim at Israel the way it did in its revenge attack on April 14. If half the drones and missiles aimed at Israel had hit their target, Israel would be reeling from a devastation worse than anything that happened on October 7. The world might have been a different place today.

    It may be convenient to dismiss concerns about a possible outbreak of a Third World War as far-fetched, and perhaps even childish. Yet, remembering a few of the things that led to two world wars might help us not to take too much for granted. 

    The immediate cause of WW1, for example, was the murder in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, prompting the Austro-Hungarian empire, supported by Germany, to declare war on Serbia. Russia, Serbia’s ally, joined. It wasn’t long before Germany declared war on Russia and invaded France, drawing Britain into the war.

    Of course, the murder of the Archduke may have been the tipping point, but a web of other factors also contributed, from the competition for territories and economic rivalries to militarism, and from the unstable alliances to the crisis in the Balkans. The Sarajevo murder was only the last straw. 

    Rules-based system

    God knows just how many more straws before we reach another breaking point. We like to think that we have a rules-based system; that the world is wiser today, restrained as much by competing interests as it is by the assurance of mutual destruction. 

    The two world wars claimed the lives of a population nearly the size of Ethiopia’s 120m and left millions more ruined forever. And yet, since the last two years we have seen, starting from the Russia-Ukraine war, traces that the world is going mad again.  

    If by the death of one man – the Archduke – the world descended into chaos, was it irrational to fear that Israel’s killing of 13 people, including seven Iranians in Iran’s embassy in Damascus and the destruction of the embassy was sufficient to spark a wider regional conflict? Has anything really changed or the world learnt anything new 110 years after WWI?

    Fewer warmongers?

    Some studies suggest so. One interesting study, for example, points to demographics as a good predictor of civil conflicts. The study, famously called the “youth bulge” suggests a strong correlation between countries prone to civil conflicts and those with fast-growing youth populations. So, the older the population, the theory goes, the less likely its appetite for a hot war.

    It suggests that in spite of the sabre-rattling in the world’s former war-mongering capitals – Washington, Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo and Moscow – the dominance of older, wealthier populations in these countries combined with concerns about managing their ageing populations have reduced their appetite for war. 

    A few like the US, Britain and France, may press the world to the edge of a frenzy with the sort of disgraceful complicity seen in the Middle East. But just before madness finally takes over, the theory argues that the leadership in countries with older, wiser populations would dial back and make the kind of last-minute call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that saves the world for another day.

    There have also been those, like foreign affairs columnist, Jonathan Power, who argue that in spite of the Russia-Ukraine war, the war in Gaza, and the under-reported deadly conflicts in South Sudan and Yemen, the world has never been at greater peace with itself than it is. 

    Although Ukraine is not too far from becoming a meat grinder and the death toll in Gaza has topped 32,000 (minus hundreds unaccounted for) studies suggest that, thanks to the better angels of our nature, there has been a reduction in battle deaths per 100,000 in state-based conflicts since the Second World War.  

    Spells of peace

    War historians say that outside the Pax Romana, and the Golden Age of Islam, the post-World War II era is probably the most peaceful time in world history. 

    A number of other reasons have also been given why a Third World War is improbable. It’s believed that the end of colonialism, the prioritisation of human rights, the general rise in global prosperity/literacy, and particularly the establishment of the United Nations, have accounted for the longest spell of peace in human history and might yet keep the world from descending into another catastrophic war.

    Maybe – and that’s a big maybe. The safeguards of our sanity are already fraying at the edges and we may just have entered a violent new era. 

    If after 77 years, Israel would still not accept the UN’s two-state solution to the problem in Palestine, preferring instead to kill over 30,000 Palestinians in pursuit of the last Hamas; if recourse to the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot restrain Israel from the widespread carnage in Gaza; if the US, Britain and France will veto the UN’s condemnation of the attack on the Iranian Embassy in spite of the significant casualties – a crime they would not accept if it had been done to them; if the US keeps showing by its conduct that might is right, then the world is not too far from another world war.

    Global institutions expected to keep the fragile balance for peace have almost all broken down, and all five veto-wielding members of the UN have gone rogue: Russia in Ukraine; China in Taiwan; and the US, Britain and France in the Middle East, and indeed anywhere else they please in pursuit of their strategic interests.

    To continue to ignore the impotence of and disdain for the global institutions supposed to preserve peace and still believe that nothing would happen, is foolish and dangerous.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Faye and France: The tyre meets the road – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Faye and France: The tyre meets the road – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The words of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye were honey to taste. Following the bitter ending of the 12-year rule of Macky Sall, highlighted by the widespread belief that France is at the heart of Senegal’s misery, a forlorn country enthusiastically lapped up Faye’s promise of a future untainted by French shenanigans.

    At a stage, it was not clear who was the public enemy #1: Sall or France? 

    Sall started well. He came to office in 2012 with solid credentials, looking every inch like what Senegal needed to break away from the incompetence and cronyism of Abdoulaye Wade under whom the country had lost its way. 

    Sall was an elite with a strong connection to the grassroots. He rallied the opposition against Wade including committing the unthinkable sin of breaking off from the ruling Parti Democratique Senegalaise (PDS) under which he served as minister. He even dragged the president’s son to account before parliament. 

    Senegalese applauded. After only a few years as president Sall offered to reduce his own term to set an example, but the country said over its dead body. If Senegal could not afford to crown him for life, he must complete his two-term limit of seven years each. 

    It’s a decision it would later regret. The country had to drag Sall through an economy in a shambles, a country falling apart, and over one dozen dead in street protests to get him out of office. By this time, he had already exceeded his constitutional term limit. Sall, in short, became the very thing that he campaigned against.

    France as dirty word

    And France? That’s a different story. From Mali to Burkina Faso and from Guinea to Niger, France has become a dirty word, even though the elite in these countries are too ashamed to admit there’s nothing France has done without their helping hand. France is not just a metaphor for underdevelopment. You’ll be forgiven to think it’s probably also the reason some formerly virile folks in the former colonies have lost their libido. It’s not a laughing matter.

    Faye’s inauguration address on April 2 was applauded because in a continent blighted by incompetent gerontocrats he is, at 44, the youngest president in Senegal’s 63-year history. But his speech was just as important. To say “enough” to France a fric – a perversion of FranceAfrique the harmless slogan of cooperation – that has made French West Africa France’s cash machine was a big deal. And Faye said it somewhat elegantly.

    Sall is past tense. But promising Senegalese a future outside the grip of France, a grip forged decades before Faye was born, is where the tyre meets the road. It’s an ambitious promise made not based on where Senegal is today, but on where it wishes to be.

    Dialing back to Senghor

    Let’s dial back. Like a number of colonies, especially the French ones, Senegal was a part of France, in law and spirit. Senegal’s first President Leopold Sedar Senghor and an in-law of France, was one of the nine African deputies at the Constituent Assembly in Paris in 1945 that prepared the constitution of the Fourth Republic, which brought de Gaulle to power. 

    That constitution according to Martin Meredith’s The Fortunes of Africa, “Endorsed the emphasis it placed on the ‘indivisible’ nature of the Union Francaise,” a union which of course included Francophone West Africa.

    Anyone in doubt about the value of Union Francaise, need to be reminded that when de Gaulle died in 1970, Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic wept at the funeral of the man he fondly called “Papa.” Guinea’s Sekou Toure was the exception to Francophone West Africa’s mushy-mushy.

    At independence, even though Senegal was better off than a number of other countries, it still relied heavily on French subsidies to pay its bills. Of course, things have changed somewhat in the last six decades, but only somewhat.

    On the day that Faye took his oath of office, pledging to cut French wings to size, France remained the largest exporter to Senegal with goods such as medicines, wheat, and copper wire. In the last 27 years, France exports to Senegal have increased at an annual rate of 3.39 percent from $461 million in 1995 to $1.1 billion in 2022.

    Of course, Nigeria, Morocco, and Ghana are also popping up on the radar, with Senegal’s intra-African trade growing by about eight percent but it would take more than a passionate inauguration speech to topple French interest, also deeply embedded in the oil and gas sectors by key businesses such as Total (formerly Elf), or BNP Paribas and Societe Generale in the financial services. 

    Scapegoating France?

    Is it even necessary to scapegoat France? Of course, it’s the popular thing and perennial French greed, not to mention the arrogance and condescension of its last two presidents, have not helped matters. But beyond red-meat politics, why should the average Senegalese be given the impression that once France – and all things French – is out of the way, the country would be on its way to a life of happily ever after?

    Faye and those in his corner would soon find that the truth is more nuanced. In today’s world, capital or investment is not monolingual. Whether it’s French, English, Arabic or Mandarin capital, it finds a home wherever it is made welcome, wherever it can find value.

    It’s not a matter of patriotic convenience, for example, that Abu Dhabi has conquered European football clubs and real estate. Britain, France, Germany and other European countries where the Emirati kingdom is invested made them feel welcome, whatever the right-wing sentiments in these countries may be. 

    Twenty-five years ago, this same kingdom, not far from the region where the West likes to call the Axis of Evil, bought the Chrysler Building, one of the most iconic features of the New York skyline, for $800 million! And surely, Faye knows that for all its sabre-rattling against China nearly three percent of US foreign debt is owed to China.

    Even though Senegal’s intra-African trade profile is looking up, CFA franc, which is still tied to the French treasury, remains the currency of Francophone countries. Plans by the 15-member regional block, Ecowas, to adopt a single currency since 1987, have gone nowhere. Similarly, Kenyan President William Ruto’s call for a pan-African payment system that would settle intra-African trade outside the dollar has gone nowhere.

    Faye’s homework

    For Faye to promise freedom from French grip on French money, French medicines and French food, is wishful thinking. The work must start from home, from within. The country must heal after the roller-coaster transition and also take steps to restore tourists’ confidence. Faye’s government needs to tackle corruption, strengthen the justice system, and help farmers deal with the impact of climate change. 

    There’s no need to demonise France. A strategic reset of Senegal’s relationship with Paris can begin with Dakar creating an environment that works for investment – wherever it is coming from – while the new government also leverages regional cooperation, especially with moderate Francophone countries in the region. 

    And the country is not doing too badly in casting its net wide. China, Russia and India are following closely behind France as Senegal’s deep-pocket trading partners. Investments from these destinations may not speak French but they may just be as unserviceable as those from Paris or elsewhere if Faye does not create the right environment for them to thrive.

    The political campaign is over: governance is where the tyre meets the road.

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Jonathan and Sam: Two Books, One Message – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Jonathan and Sam: Two Books, One Message – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Before The Human Flow was published, Jonathan, one of Europe’s most accomplished foreign affairs columnists and journalists, had talked with excitement about the book. It was his first novel. Like a woman who became pregnant when she thought she was past child-bearing, Jonathan, 82, couldn’t wait to make Mary Wesley look like a child prodigy.

    Sam Omatseye’s book, Beating All the Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Tinubu Became President, on the other hand, is part diary, part essay. The diary would have been difficult to script even if a fiction writer had tried to imagine the outcome of events in the months leading up to the 2023 general elections in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

    The thing about diaries is that you never know. When the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), a legacy member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was compiling A Witness to History, for example, the party could not have imagined that it was writing the final chapters of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) government that had lost its way for good.

    This gift of the unknown is also exemplified in The Diary of a Young Girl, the story of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl caught up in the turmoil of the Second World War, but who in spite of it produced a diary that has become both a record of history and also a work of moral philosophy.

    Damned either way

    From the first part of Sam’s 349-page book, it’s improbable that he knew exactly which way the wind would blow when he started journaling ahead of the February 2023 presidential election, two months after the APC presidential primary in 2022. 

    Unlike former military president General Ibrahim Babangida who famously said he didn’t know who would succeed him but he knew those who wouldn’t, President Muhammadu Buhari appeared confused about both. His body language, which became a metaphor for his government’s malaise, suggested that the front-runner, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the subject of Sam’s book, was not his preferred candidate.

    Even though Tinubu had picked the APC’s presidential ticket when Sam started his diary and decency required that Buhari would rally the party behind its candidate, the party became Tinubu’s worst enemy. It wasn’t just the usual horse-trading, feather-ruffling, and back-stabbing that come with internal party politics. It was a betrayal of Judas-like proportions, plotted to swallow Tinubu alive. 

    “I have looked at the whole situation,” Tinubu tells Sam, “I told myself, if I didn’t run, I’m damned. If I ran, they may want to damn me. So, I had to run, anyway.”

    Inside Ota lair

    Sam’s diary opens with an entry on August 19, 2022, about Tinubu’s pilgrimage to the Ota, the lair of one of Nigeria’s political gods, President Olusegun Obasanjo. Whatever the sacrifice Tinubu offered at the Ota shrine on that visit, his token may have fallen short. 

    In spite of the photo-ops and pretensions of ethnic solidarity, Obasanjo whom Sam describes as “the old fox of Nigeria’s politics,” later cast his lot with the Labour Party candidate, Peter Obi, reopening old memories of mutual distrust between Obasanjo and Tinubu.

    Three main issues dominate the diary: One, the conspiracies within the APC, right up to the Presidency, to subvert Tinubu’s ambition; two, the division within the PDP, which split the party into at least three irreconcilable factions, the Nyesom Wike faction being the most potent; and three, the bitter pushback by anti-Tinubu groups – masquerading sometimes as the religious police, sometimes as ethnic tin-gods, and yet at other times as the youth avantgarde – all sparing neither mud nor kitchen sink in their desperate attempts to stop him. 

    “It seems obvious,” Sam says in his February 17, 2023 entry, “that the worries that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu expressed about efforts to scuttle his path to victory have never been better revealed than when the President (Buhari) went on national television and defied the Supreme Court ruling (on the currency crisis) …the president gave ammunition to the other contestants.”

    The Atiku Syndrome

    The bulk of the entries however centres on the Atiku Syndrome, a condition that makes the sufferer utterly unable to see or seize an opportunity even if beaten on the head with it; and the unrestrained bitterness of “Obidients” towards the Tinubu campaign. 

    Sam, whose diary makes no pretence of his support for Tinubu, not only highlights the misery that the division between Atiku and Wike’s G-5 brought upon the PDP, he also invokes the worst of Atiku’s politics, and takes no prisoners amongst “Obidients” who wanted his head on a platter, especially after his controversial article, “Obi-tuary”.

    Even though the opposition’s divided house set the ducks of Tinubu’s victory on a row, Sam had his anxious moments not a few.  At one point, he asks Tinubu if there is a Plan B, because, he says, “I knew Buhari did not want him and the vampires around him did not want him.” 

    The rest is history, enriched by the second part of his book – a careful curation of a decade’s worth of some of his most engaging weekly columns in The Nation.

    Love story

    In The Human Flow, Jonathan took a different tack away from – but enriched by – his commentary on foreign affairs published for decades on many platforms across the world. The novel is a love story expressed as a tragedy of our modern existence: the trafficking of West African migrants.

    In some ways, the book reminded me of Sina Odugbemi’s Japa,a slim but horrific personal account of the author’s search for greener pastures through the Sahara Desert, complete with tales of his Maghreb nightmares. 

    Or perhaps Olusegun Adeniyi’s From Frying Pan to Fire, a searing account of the human tragedies experienced in the elusive chase for a better life in Europe by thousands of African migrants who are consumed by the unforgiving desert or trafficked as slaves long before they can achieve their dreams.

    The difference, perhaps, is that while Odugbemi’s and Adeniyi’s accounts are based on real-life stories, The Human Flow is a narrative prose fiction of the life of a Tanzanian-based white British journalist, Jon, whose quest to expose the evils of human trafficking led him into an odyssey of a complicated romance, adventure and tragedy.

    Complicated affair

    The main characters in the book are Jon, and his Tanzanian girlfriend, Agnes. In their pursuit for truth, they fall in love. Their affair is deepened by Agnes’s brief kidnapping and the search for her that led Jon into romantic entanglement with a married Spanish journalist, Ana. 

    The quest also reveals a web of human traffickers comprising religious leaders, local chiefs, border police, hustlers and deadly gangs. These forces sometimes work for or against each other, but unfailingly prey on the desperation of their victims for that basic human instinct of a better life.

    In the end, Jon and Agnes are captured by a deadly guerilla movement in Morocco and murdered in Libya. 

    In the former world, European migrants to Africa were impeded by geography and tropical diseases but they overcame by guile and gunpowder. In today’s reverse migration, hope and dinghies are the main vessels for African migrants. 

    Conclusion of the matter

    Unfortunately, as we see from The Human Flow the brutal realities confronting African migrants range from human traffickers to deadly gangs and compromised or hostile border police, leaving the migrants with forlorn hopes and broken dreams, if they survive.  

    There’s a place where Sam’s poetic prose and Jonathan’s enthralling story-telling meet: leadership. The failure of leadership is responsible for the booby traps and chaos thrown on Tinubu’s path in the runup to the 2023 election on Buhari’s watch. It also explains why African youths are risking everything to escape the continent.

    Both diary and novel meet at the crossroads of Africa’s biggest problem: leadership.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP