Monday, October 30, 2023

Blessed Are The Human Rights Defenders

 By Owei Lakemfa

My mind raced back 34 years as I stood on Saturday in the assembly of human rights defenders who had gathered in Ilorin. Back in 1989, some of us had the choice either to surrender or confront the rampaging Generals who had seized both power and the national treasury and were ruling Nigerians as they would: a conquered people. The 1775 words of Patrick Henry, an American planter, rang in our heads: “Give me liberty or give me death!” 

We were guided by the examples of our ancestors like Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, Raji Abdallah, Bello Ujumu and our mothers in Eastern Nigeria in 1929 who fought what seemed to be unwinnable battles for freedom.

Why Senate Should Not Endorse Use Of Firearms By FRSC

 By Joseph Ikpea Igiagbe 

I write as a true Nigerian to make an appeal to our collective sense of national responsibility towards getting rid of official and illegal small weapons and light ammunition in our society. I particularly want to appeal to all the Distinguished Senators of the Federal Republic to treat this matter with the urgency that it deserves. 

I will like to state that there is no contesting the fact that the amount of ammunition and weapons in the hands of legal and legitimate security agencies as well as private individuals, let alone the ones in the hands of non-state actors, is a soft threat to our national security and it is becoming very worrisome, thus demanding a concerted effort at retrieving same as well as demilitarising our society. 

Sunday, October 29, 2023

SUVs For Lawmakers: Justifying The Insane!

 By Adekunle Adekoya

I am sure that I number among the millions of Nigerians that were stupefied when a senator justified expenditure of N160 million on one SUV for each of our lawmakers. To put it in street lingo, I was “flabberwhelmed and overgasted” when I read the rationalisation of the immoral act. To put it in proper context, let me recall the conversation.

Chairman, Committee on Senate Services, Sunday Karimi (APC, Kogi) spoke with newsmen on the public outcry against the vehicles’ purchase, and said the criticism was uncalled for as members of the other arms of government use similar vehicles.

Nigeria: Lawmakers’ Exotic SUVs

 By Robert Obioha

The 10th National Assembly (NASS) is always in the news for the wrong reasons since its inauguration some months ago. Although such hiccups are not unexpected with the newly elected leadership, but when they became so frequent without any sign of abating soon, there is indeed something to worry about the present crop of legislators. This is also not actually the best of times for the turbulent NASS. Some members are still grieving over how the current leadership of the NASS emerged and the sharing of perks of office. It is time to bury the hatchet and move on.

When the members are not protesting over the sharing of committee jobs, they are complaining over the sharing of some perks of office or what Senate President Godswill Obot Akpabio humorously described as prayer points sent to their bank accounts, sorry, mailboxes, or both, for want of better expression. Nigerians were not deceived over what actually transpired with the prayer point episode. Recently, the Chief Whip, Senator Ali Ndume, from the North-East, walked out of the Red Chamber over minor issues as point of order or point of correction over how Akpabio handles issues. The Senate President promptly overruled Ndume.

Friday, October 27, 2023

W.F. Kumuyi Abroad: Africa’s New Narrative

 By Banji Ojewale

 The West has no business sending missionaries to Nigeria; they can’t help us; they have lost Christianity…substantially…They are the ones who need us. We will give (the erring West) pastoral help…Africa is now the historical custodian of (true) Christianity. – Bishop Professor Dapo Asaju, former Vice Chancellor of Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo State, Nigeria.

*Pastor Kumuyi

As July of 2022 closed, Pastor William Folorunso Kumuyi, General Superintendent of Deeper Christian Life Ministry, DCLM, was also closing a chapter that, according to some theologians, made his ministry somehow ‘insular and centripetal’, even if his messages, as we all know, have always been universal. At an event in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub, Kumuyi drew our attention to a new point in his evangelical trajectory, when he formally launched the initiative he christened Global Crusade with Kumuyi, GCK.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

Akpabio: How Not To Be A Senate President

 By Emmanuel Onwubiko

In 2019, Mr Omagbitse Barrow wrote that many Nigerians have never really thought seriously about the competencies required to be an effective legislator and using these competencies as the basis for selecting legislators and evaluating their performance.

*Akpabio and Tinubu 

He then said that in case you have not reflected on this before, there are five core competencies that every effective legislator should possess that are acceptable all over the world and align with oversight and legislation.

He listed them but I will borrow three which are: character; communication and courage. On character, he argued that legislators as the promoters and defenders of the Constitution and the laws of Nigeria, must seek to be beyond reproach. They must have very high standards of personal integrity and conduct themselves in a disciplined and ethical manner at all times.

Elections: Is Anyone Still Listening To Mahmoud Yakubu?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Obviously, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Mahmoud Yakabu, must be in love with the sound of his own voice. That is why he keeps blabbing even when no one is listening. 

*Yakubu 

He is, once again, playing the game he knows how best – lying to himself and taking Nigerians for a ride. In doing that, he probably thinks he is fooling the people. 

But he never reckons with the admonition of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who once said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” 

Inflation Is The Worst Economic Evil, Yet Tinubu Fuels It!

 By Olu Fasan

The first test of any government is its ability to manage the economy. For without a strong economy, a government can’t improve people’s lives; it can’t generate jobs, reduce poverty or tackle insecurity. Hence, a former British prime minister said: “The economy is the start and end of everything”, and an American political strategist coined the phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

*Tinubu

However, this universal truth eludes Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu. His overall economic orientation, dubbed ‘Tinubunomics’, smacks of economic illiteracy. My focus here is not ‘Tinubunomics’ itself, a subject for another column, but Tinubu’s attitude to inflation, the worst economic evil. 

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Dr. M.I. Okpara Was Different

 By Christopher C. Ulasi 

Dr. Micheal Iheonukara Okpara governed the nine states which made up eastern Nigeria from 1959 to 1966.  When the military coup of 1966 terminated his governorship on January 16, 1966 the only property he owned was an old bungalow he had in his village Umuahia Abia State.  When the Biafra war ended in January 1970 he desired to study Economics in an American University but he could not raise the fees.

In 1974 after he had gone back to brush up his medical knowledge and was in Edinburgh for his membership examination he shared a flat with a foreigner, a West Indian. 

Save The President From Himself!

 By Dan Onwukwe

Nothing is normal any more in Nigeria. In both scale and scope, the ominous signs are everywhere for any discerning mind to see. The message is simple:  What leaders do while they are trying to get political power is not necessarily what they do after they have it. That, in itself, is lesson in power. Whatever former President Muhammadu Buhari made worse for Nigeria and its citizens, Tinubu presidency is striving to make breathtakingly  much worse in scope.

*Tinubu
If Buhari was, for want of a better word, a nepotistic Northern President, Tinubu is careening dangerously towards becoming, to paraphrase Olusegun Adeniyi, columnist and Chairman, Editorial Board, ThisDay newspapers, an ‘Oduduwa President’. The evidence is no longer in doubt. 

Addressing Failed Government Policies That Fuel Food Inflation

By Adefolarin A. Olamilekan

Food, food and food remain the most constant nutritional and vitamin value humans cannot do without. Our existence depends on it or else humanity will go into extinction. We cannot dare joke about the lack of food. Nobody has made food its enemy.

These are the reasons why serious nations make deliberate efforts toward not just having food security, but making it strategically abundant, available, and affordable for the people. In other words, there is greater attention to government policy direction that defines food, essentially, as the number one priority on the scale of preference. In this regard, the policy to make food available all year round and affordable is not toiled with no matter how the economic technical conundrum calls it inflation or food inflation.

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Citizens Of A Turbulent World In Search Of A Direction

 By Owei Lakemfa

It was a multinational gathering which included 41 embassies. It was a trans-generational assembly which comprised diplomats of the 1960s and 70s, activists of the 1980s and current students, mostly from Bingham University, Keffi. Also in the assembly were government officials, labour leaders, writers and academics. The gathering on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at the Rotunda Hall of the Foreign Ministry, Abuja was organised by the foreign relations think tank, the Society for International Relations Awareness, SIRA. The theme was: “Africa In The Turbulence of A World In Search of Direction.”

As SIRA President, I welcomed the assembly with the assertion that the slaughter in the Middle East, the war of attrition in Ukraine, the carnage in Syria, the barbaric conflict in Yemen, the blind war in Sudan, the unending battles in Somalia and other such conflicts, diminish humanity. I reminded them that we are confronted with a world in which the richest 10 per cent own 52 per cent of all income, while the poorest 52 per cent get just 8.5 per cent. These realities and climate change, I argued, endanger all humanity.

Robbing The Poor To Pamper The Rich

 By Dan Onwukwe

Every passing day, reports about Nigeria and its political leaders, have become astonishingly revolting. It draws tears.  While the economy is on a cliffhanger, the rate of poverty in the country is frighteningly rising. With poor Nigerians facing extremely difficult times, and most parents  unable to afford to pay their children’s school fees, another class of Nigerians seem to be living in a completely different world, behaving like overfed, drunken sailors, living in denial, oblivious of the raging storms. And while the government has continued in its borrowing binge, cost of governance is soaring. It’s all about breathing down the necks of the poor to take care of the rich  at the expense of the already lean public treasury.

Never in my adult life have I seen  this class of freewheeling, impudent, profligate, reckless, selfish, self-serving  politicians to whom shame has become a passé. To borrow the words of former minister,  Dr Oby Ezekwesili, who last week described our federal lawmakers as an ‘incorrigible bunch of lawbreakers who rigged themselves into office, and felt entitled to an indulgent life funded by the miserable public treasury’. The truth is, nobody who steals political power uses it to benefit people.  That’s the heart of Ezekwesili’s message. Moreover, if  corruption were a disqualifying offence, almost all politicians in Nigeria would be out of work, and perhaps half of them would have been in jail. But this is Nigeria. What a country! 

It raises pertinent questions: Who can save Nigeria from this desperate, selfish politicians? Is Nigeria jinxed on the leadership index? Why is our present class of politicians far worse than the previous ones? Is our leadership recruitment process to blame? Why is it that what works in other democracies don’t work in Nigeria? How did we come to this sorry state, where nothing works and our lawmakers have become more of freewheelers and rent-seekers than lawmakers.  For want of a fitting description, with little exception, most of our present politicians have become open sores to the country? Frankly, any of these questions you attempt to answer, leads inexorably to another, more troubling ones. Who did this to us? Is Nigeria cursed, or are we the cause?  We need some reminders, one of which  is that, nothing happens to a country that is not a reflection of the character and temperament of the politicians in that country.    

This is in line with the saying that every country is its own laboratory  of democracy. Look around:  It’s not hard to gauge the mood of Nigerians since Bola Tinubu was declared President by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on that unforgettable wee hours of Wednesday morning, March 1, 2023. Nigeria’s skylines have been painted in worst colours. They are colours of despair, pain, disillusionment and profound frustrations never seen since the present democratic dispensation, 24 years ago.  If you have observed closely, you possibly have noticed what could be called the emergence of blood -and- thunder politicians who believe only in “their way- or -the highway” kind of politics.      

These are a bunch of politicians, who are in politics purely for personal aggrandisement, to enrich themselves at public expense. They have  little tolerance for prudence, transparency and accountability. They have no real agenda other than to dominate other people. The pain of the poor has become their luxury. And you ask: Why do the worst set of people rise to power in some countries?  That was the question posed by Brian Paul Klass, a young American scientist and author of the Corruptible, and co-author of, How to Rig an Election. Look at the idiocy that is happening at both chambers of the National Assembly. Their riotous habits remain unchanged, even when the citizens they claim to represent groan under the terrible burden of hunger and misery unleashed by the Tinubu administration.     

The danger signal to the present reckless behaviour of the  federal lawmakers began so early after the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly. According to Business Day Report of June 27,  barely one week after Godswill  Akpabio was inaugurated as President of the Senate, his security aides were seen riding expensive, exotic power bikes as part of his convoy. All over Abuja, the convoys of politicians have become obscene spectacle in a country where over 133 million Nigerians are multidimensionality poor. 

Few days ago, the lid was blown open of the purchase of 360 Prado Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs)  for all the members of the House of Representatives at cost estimated at N57.6bn or  N130 million each. Some reports put the cost of each of the SUV at N160 million each. The House spokesperson,  Akin Rotimi tried to fool Nigerians when he said that the amount was a “bit exaggerated”. He admitted that the SUVs will be distributed to the legislators, but “not for personal use”. Did you hear that? 

That was a remarkably ineffectual job, a briefcase of excuses of rebutting a collosal waste of public money.  Fudging facts has never been in short supply with Nigerian politicians. Who says our politics and politicians are not a fun to follow? This is happening at a time when our universities, hospitals are grossly underfunded, and our roads have become deathtraps, insecurity still squeezing everybody to a corner, and organised labour asking for salary increase amid soaring cost of living as a result of rising inflation, unemployment and general decline in standard of living index. And government stonewalling to grant the request of workers.            

All of this is happening as the salaries and perks of political office holders are on the rise and constantly under review. As of 2018, Sen. Shehu Sani revealed that a senator was paid N13.5 million per month as salary, and N750,000 as ‘running cost’ every month. According to recent estimates, the 48 ministers appointed by President Tinubu will cost the country a hefty N8.6bn in four years as emoluments. This is coming when the Tinubu administration is set to borrow a fresh $1.5 billion from the World Bank to support the 2024 budget. Recall that the Debt Management Office DMO had cautioned against further borrowing. At this profligate rate, it’s too early to know whether there will be anything left in the treasury in the next four years. 

Right now, those who should know say that Nigeria’s financial balance sheet looks grim like a limited liability company under receivership. Bankruptcy is imminent. Why not, when over 96 percent of revenue is spent on debt servicing, yet our lawmakers are living a life of obscene revelry in a sinking Titanic. Never in recent memory has Nigeria drifted off so dangerously in every index of human measurements as it is now. The lose of confidence in government and politicians is at all-time high. It’s destroying the social, economic and political fabric of the country. The future is bleak, yet the political leadership is unperturbed.  

Make no mistakes about it: what the APC administration has made of Nigeria and Nigerians in the last 8 years(and counting), is unimaginable. It is like a virus that has infested all facets of our lives. As already said, it’s an open sore, an existential threat that strikes at the very heart and soul of our national will to coexist as one nation in diversity. The facts are there.  Whatever APC inherited from the PDP in 2015, it has virtually destroyed all. What Buhari made worse, Tinubu has made worst in just  five months as President. Take a few samplers: In 2015, the Naira exchanged at N200/$1. As of last weekend, it was N1,100/$.                                                

Our foreign reserves was $35.25bn in May, 2015, today, it is less than $23trn. National debt profile was N18.89trn in 2015, today, it is more than N87trn. In 2015, inflation rate was 13 percent, today it’s 26.7 percent, representing 18- year  high, according to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). A litre of fuel was N95 in 2015, today, it’s over  N630 depending on the location. A bag of 50kg of Rice was sold at N8,000, today, it’s over N48,000. The question is: Are you better off today than you were in 2015? 

This is what Robert Allan Caro, a renowned American journalist and author of many biographies of U.S. political figures wrote about the likes of Nigerian politicians: “What leaders do while they are trying to get power is not necessarily what they do after they have it”.                                           

It’s all about the complexity of ambition, and the delusional forgetfulness by some politicians that, in the end, power is transient. As Lord Acton said, ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. What does that tell us?  Certainly, there will be life after politics. Is what Tinubu doing now what he said when he was campaigning for the office of the President?  

Where is the “Renewed Hope” that he promised? Hope has given way to pessimism. Is he paying attention to the cry of Nigerians over worsening hunger in the land?  I have read Caro’s observation many times, and situating it to the context of Nigerian politicians, especially the ones strutting the political stage now, the message sinks in. One sad reality is that, to paraphrase Caro, without a vision beyond their own advancement, leaders are almost paralyzed once the goal of acquiring power has been achieved.   

*Onwukwe is a commentator on public issues    

 

Killing Nigerian Economy And Killing Nigerians!

 By Kenneth Okonkwo

John Locke was a renowned human rights activist of the natural law school of thought. He wrote that certain rights, self-evidently, pertain to individuals by virtue of their being human beings. In his words, man entered into a social contract by which he surrendered to the sovereign, not his rights, but only the power to preserve order and enforce the human rights of man. The individual retained the natural rights to life, liberty, and property for these were the natural and inalienable rights of man.

According to him, the purpose of government is the preservation of the lives, liberties and possessions of members of society. He warned that as long as government fulfills this purpose, its law should be binding. When it ceases to protect or begins to encroach on these natural rights, laws lose their validity and the government loses its legitimacy.

Monday, October 23, 2023

The King Is Naked, Why Fear The King?

 By Felix Oguejiofor

A naked king is like the legendary naked truth: both are contemptible, unwanted.

As the legend goes, truth, always impeccably dressed in white, was the darling of everyone. On the other hand, lie, always dirty and in rags, was despised by everyone, a complete turn-off. One day, according to the legend, truth went to the stream to bathe and, to be sure, she removed her white clothes, put them by the side of the river and dived into the water. Lie, ever looking to better her lot at the expense of truth, took the latter’s white clothes, put them on and ran away.

Truth came out of the water in her full nakedness and ran after lie, to no avail. In one of the most dramatic examples of trading places, well before the legendary Eddy Murphy and Dan Aykroyd acted it out in the 1983 epic American comedy film, Trading Places, lie, now resplendently dressed in white (white lie) became society’s darling while truth, now completely naked and unkempt, became society’s despised and unwanted. As it is today, while many would rather be told ‘white’ lies, very many others are simply loathe to hear the ‘naked’ truth. Meaning that even truth, once it becomes naked, becomes abhorrent!

When I first read about this legend in one of columnist Ike Abonyi’s must-read pieces in his Thursday Political Musings column in New Telegraph, it struck me as quite symbolic of the current Nigerian situation: our king is, certainly, naked now and the aura of the throne gone. So, society must of necessity redeem itself. Or will the cabinet answer to a naked king on the throne? Will a land and people allow a naked king to interact and conduct business with other kingdoms on their behalf? Will the palace guards still give their limbs to protect a naked king insistent on sitting on the throne of their forefathers?

In ancient Israel, as recorded in the Bible, once the glory of God left a king, he was all but dead to the kingdom. Until his death, Saul was only a king in mouth after the God of Moses and Joshua pulled His support from His own anointed and gave it to David. It was obvious from the unimaginable missteps of Bubu that the glory of God had long left his ‘house and kingdom’ (read APC).

Indeed, while the lifeless one was king, we, at first, lived in mortal fear of him. Because we thought he was a king with his clothes on. For a moment, even our eternally erratic power supply stabilized and we were only too happy to ascribe the development to the king’s aura and our fear of him. The usually disruptive, not to say sabotaging, electricity workers, it was said, were afraid of the long, punishing hands of the presumably no-nonsense king. Until we discovered that he was nothing more that a hobbled Khalifa, one with neither the purity of heart nor the wisdom that progressive leadership required: he was just an existence in time and space – a naked king without any substance!

Needless to say that our honeymoon with Bubu was brief, nothing more than a year plus, before he was completely unmasked as a man with nothing to offer as a leader. What we did was to stop fearing him and start despising him. Any surprise that Bubu, to say the least, was such a disaster, a leader who turned Nigeria upside-down for the eight years he answered president?

Unfortunately for the current king, he became naked from the very beginning. Therefore, having known or seen him inside out, what do we have again to fear him for? As my friend Abraham Ogbodo recently offered in one incisive piece on a platform to which I also belong, Bola Tinubu has no wherewithal to recommend him for the Nigerian presidency beyond the corrupting influence of money. Of the three most prominent presidential candidates in the February 25, 2023 election, Tinubu has the least national appeal. And one doesn’t even have to believe former SGF, Babachir Lawal’s word for it. For, as they say, by their fruits we shall know them. And, of course, PBAT’s fruits aren’t exactly the universally or, if you will, nationally consumable types.

So, yes, why would the Nigerian establishment still hail this king? Striped of all moral authority (thanks to the recent discoveries about his embarrassing propensity for forgeries) to reward good behaviour or punish infractions, why would the operators of this system still appear so willing to do the bidding of this king, even to the extent of courting the risk of practically throwing the nation under the bus without a tinge of conscience? Why so eager to please a naked king?

Let’s face it, what judicial system would garland a man whose obvious infractions of the law warrant that he should actually be out of circulation for his sins? While Bubu was clean enough (or so we thought initially) to harass even the judiciary and get away with it, on what grounds would the Nigerian judiciary subject itself to the current public pillory and odium that have become its lot, for the sake of one man whose records have been proven by courts of competent jurisdiction in Nigeria and elsewhere to be unwholesome, unable to withstand any legal scrutiny?

What debts of obligation, which must be repaid even at the risk of  destroying the foundations of the nation’s democracy, does the Nigerian judiciary owe PBAT and others like him holding positions of trust in society but with personal records that are clearly at odds with what are permissible under the law? Would the Nigerian Bench and Bar so conveniently destroy the hallowed position of the judiciary as every democracy’s bulwark against dictatorship and other manipulative geniuses of politicians, simply on the altar self-aggrandizement?

Elsewhere in the world (as we recently saw in the case of Atiku Abubakar v Bola Tinubu in the district courts of Illinois, Chicago, the United States), the judiciary gets people who infract the law to account for their actions, irrespective of their status in life.  Immediate past President of the of the United States, Mr. Donald Trump has been in and out of courts since leaving office in 2020 for his alleged offences against the law, in his private and business life. Every attempt by President Tinubu’s lawyers to prevent the Illinois courts from forcing Chicago State University (CSU) to release the president’s academic records expectedly fell through because the United States courts couldn’t be dissuaded from releasing the documents whose release, the courts were persuaded, was in public interest.

 

 The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had initially said it would not make public its files on PBAT until 2026 but had to decide otherwise, agreeing to release them batch by batch starting this month (beginning from October 23, to be precise). The FBI’s change of plan followed a freedom of information request filed last year by Aaron Greenspan, owner of PlainSite, a website that pushes anti-corruption and transparency in public service,  in collaboration with Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin. Again, the need to serve justice in public interest overrode the technicality of the seeming inviolability of FBI’s rules and schedules, hence the decision to release PBAT’s well ahead the earlier scheduled 2026. Although PBAT’s lawyers are fighting hard to prevent those FBI files on him from being made public, it is most likely that, as in his case with Atiku, the Nigerian leader will have his files with FBI made public as already scheduled by the agency.

 

That is what Nigerians expect from their judiciary: to always courageously stand on the side of justice for the many and not destroy its own essence just to serve the interests of a few powerful elements in society. As the Supreme Court hears LP presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi and his PDP counterpart, Atiku Abubakar’s appeals against the ruling of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) dismissing their petitions against INEC’s declaration of Tinubu as winner of this year’s February 25 presidential election, starting this Monday, the question many have asked and continue to ask is, will the Nigerian judiciary ditch technicalities and stand on the side of justice for the many this time around?

Soon, very soon, that question will be answered one way or another.

*Oguejiofor is a commentator on public issues 

Thursday, October 19, 2023

TheNiche Lecture: Why Does Nigeria Stride And Slide?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

On Thursday, October 26, the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, NIIA, Nigeria’s foremost think-tank on foreign affairs, will host the 2023 edition of TheNiche Annual Lecture spearheaded by the TheNiche Foundation for Development Journalism.



The lecture series, TheNiche’s annual corporate social responsibility initiative, is aimed at fostering the much-needed but ever-elusive national renaissance. Nigeria is at a crossroads, no doubt, teetering on the brink, facing the abyss. And this is not about being a prophet of doom. All the indices of human development, without any exception, are not only pointing south but are getting worse by the day. 

The Truth About Fuel Subsidy: Government Simply Fails Nigerians

 By Olu Fasan

Subsidy is gone. Subsidy is back. Oh no, it isn’t. Oh yes, it is. Such is the confusion that now dogs the fuel subsidy. On May 29, Bola Tinubu veered from his inauguration speech and blurted out: “Subsidy is gone”. With that diktat, market forces would dictate petrol price. Soon after, the price tripled from N197/litre to N620/litre, fuelling a surge in food and transport costs. However, surreptitiously, some subsidy seems to have returned to stop the soaring price of fuel. But the Tinubu administration denies any intervention.

Yet, market operators are adamant. In a recent interview, Festus Osifo, National President of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, said “the government is still paying subsidies on petroleum”. Mele Kyari, Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum company limited, NNPCL, issued a rebuttal: “There’s no subsidy whatsoever.” But John Kekeocha, National Secretary of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, IPMAN, said the government “is still spending billions to subsidise fuel,” adding: “I don’t know why they keep peddling lies.”

Dele Giwa: 37 Years After The Gruesome Murder Of This Celebrated Journalist

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 

“Death is…the absence of presence…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound”  Tom Stopard    

In the morning of Monday, October 20, 1986, I was preparing to go to work when a major item on the Anambra Broadcasting Service (ABS) 6.30 news bulletin hit me like a hard object. Mr. Dele Giwa, the founding editor-in-chief of ‘Newswatch’ magazine, had the previous day been killed and shattered by a letter bomb in his Lagos home. My scream was so loud that my colleague barged into my room to inquire what it was that could have made me to let out such an ear-splitting bellow. 

*Dele Giwa 

We were three young men who had a couple of months earlier been posted from Enugu to Abakaliki to work in the old Anambra State public service, and we had hired a flat in a newly erected two-storey building at the end of Water Works Road, which we shared. My flat-mate, clearly, was not familiar with Giwa’s name and work, and so had wondered why his death could elicit such a reaction from me. 

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

The Terrible Injustice Of Mob Justice

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

Nigeria’s seemingly unstoppable guillotine of mob justice has claimed yet another victim  with the brutal killing of Mr. Fwinbe Thomas Gofwan by a mob in Jos for stealing a car he owned, by all accounts. In Nigeria, the mob that has shown itself lurking and lethal in Sokoto State, the Federal Capital Territory, as well as Delta State usually moves with such lightning ferocity whenever there is a sacrifice to be made.

In May 2022, Deborah Samuel, a student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, had life brutally snuffed out of her by a mob in the state over a WhatsApp audio message. More than a year later, the police is yet to bring the culprits to book. History was to repeat itself in Sokoto State in June 2023 when Usman Buda, a butcher, was lynched by a mob over allegations of blasphemy, to further present Sokoto as the state where people are freely killed by feral mobs.

Food Crisis And Nigeria’s Multi-Dimensional Poverty

 By Jerome-Mario Utomi

If there is any fresh fact that supports the claim by the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, in November 2022, that Multidimensional Poverty Index, MPI, is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, it is my experience during a short visit to Agbor, a community which, according to Wikipedia, is the most populous among the Ika people, located in, and functions as the headquarters of Ika South Local Government Area of Delta State, in South-South geo-political zone of Nigeria.

Among many other observations, the referenced report puts the MPI in rural areas at 72% and that of urban areas 42%, thereby confirming that a much higher proportion of people living in rural areas, compared to those living in urban areas, are multidimensionally poor. The report further noted that 63% (133 million people) – that is about six out of every 10 Nigerians– are multidimensionally poor, with 65% [86 million] and 35% [47 million] of the poor living in the North and South of Nigeria respectively. The implication is that location matters with respect to poverty and unemployment, the report concluded.