Before Nyesom Wike’s Fire Consumes Nigeria

 By Luka Danboyi

The self-immolating tendency for people to be indifferent to situations in which they are not directly involved seems to be playing out in the debacle in Rivers State. Curiously, there are people who are enjoying the political drama between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and his predecessor-cum-godfather, Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT.

*Wike 

There is no question that the vast majority of Nigerians are inured to the shenanigans of a disoriented political elite that hardly reckons with the plight of the people. Only such a situation would produce the present economic nightmare afflicting a country so richly endowed that, less than 50 years ago, other countries were visiting to understudy its impressive developmental effort and to borrow ‘seeds’ for their agricultural revolution.

Nigeria: Tracing Grazing Routes Through The Presidential Villa

 By Owei Lakemfa

Alhaji Tanimu Yakubu was Special Adviser on Economic Matters to President Umaru Musa Yar’adua. Before becoming one of Nigeria’s best Presidents in our leadership-challenged country, Yar’Adua was Governor of Katsina State and TY, as Yakubu is fondly called, was one of his cabinet members  for three years from 1999.

When TY was preparing that administration’s first budget in Katsina State, he studied the past trends in the government support for agriculture. He discovered that annually, 80 per-cent of the agriculture budget was allocated for  fertilizer procurement.

Given the fact that there are a number of clearly identified necessities of agriculture, he decided to research why fertilizer alone was consuming four fifths of the agriculture budget.

He appointed consultants to carry out a survey amongst farmers in the state to generate a list of their actual needs; they were 20 items. Then, a second stage of the survey was carried out for the farmers to rank those needs from the most to the least important. The result was shocking. The farmers listed fertilizer as the 13th in their list of their needs! Desertification was ranked number one, extension service, two and  market/profitability, three. The farmers did not even identify subsidy as a requisite.