“They fleece Nigeria and escape sanctions. Their immunity is sourced from Nigeria’s peculiar self-hate and self-neglect. The forex crisis that today ravages Nigerians and Nigerian entities makes no sense to them. They make forex and ship them home to their owners. At a point in the decade before the last, the Central Bank of Nigeria complained loudly that the foreign companies did not allow their cash to stay for more than a few weeks in Nigeria “before they were converted to foreign exchange for one purchase or the other.” Since that decade up till now, their foot has remained slammed on the throttle; they do not think what is wrong is bad. Do not blame them. Blame Nigeria that does not clothe its own from the ravages of dry winds from outside. If our government would not create heaven for us and for entities that belong to Nigerians, they should at least lead us away from the hell of hostile aliens.”

In May, 1891, James Richard Jewett of Brown University, Providence, United States, presented a paper on ‘Arabic Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases’ to the American Oriental Society. The paper was eventually published as an article in that society’s journal in 1893. One striking line I picked in that paper last week is the author’s entry of what he calls Jiha’s Cow. He writes: “Jiha slaughtered his cow, sold the meat, and received his pay. After a while, he again demanded pay from each purchaser and received it. He kept doing this till he died.” What Jiha did would not be strange to you if you were a Nigerian. We pay many times and forever for a paradise long lost.

Nigeria is a low wall mounted by every goat. I see Jiha in how the regime we have treats us. Trending now is electricity apartheid that stratifies the haves and the have-nots. They call it electricity subsidy removal. They band and disband cities; they grade and degrade streets. They distribute darkness and allocate fanciful power hours. The favoured are queued up as Band A; the disfavored are petty men packed into other bands ending empty-handed with letter E. Families sob, businesses weep. Indeed, the regime’s Julius Caesar “doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus.” They reduce all to the emperor’s “underlings, …petty men (who) walk under his huge legs”. In response to our cries, they bid us to do what Shakespeare’s Romans do: “peep about to find for ourselves dishonorable graves.” 

I know there are partisan optimists who still wait at the port for the illusory cargo and at the harbour for the crab of this regime to wink. But for me, it is enough on this domestic darkness and the banditry in our forest of demons.
I shift my gaze to the enemy outside.

If you canter, trot or amble like a horse, the world will saddle you up. I see Jiha and his cow meat in how Nigeria and Nigerian businesses are treated by competition from outside. The outside is never tired of demanding payment for goods it never sold to us – and we keep paying. They did and do it in telecoms – the Globacom experience. The trending act is in aviation. Air Peace, a Nigerian airline, recently started operating the Lagos-London route. I read of hell being unleashed by the world’s lords of the sky.

I thought we were told that the sky has enough space for all birds to fly without clashing. It is no longer so. Or, it has never been so in the business of air travel. One Jide Iyaniwura, a passenger on Air Peace’s recent inaugural flight from Gatwick to Lagos, in a social media post, alleged that from what he saw on the day of the inaugural flight, the British government was intent on frustrating Air Peace out of the London route. He said: “British Airways and Virgin were the only airlines doing direct flight from Lagos to London before Air Peace joined. The British government will do everything within their power to truncate the effort of any Nigerian carrier trying to break into that market.” He provided clues and cited acts that suggested his conclusion. “It is a government-to-government fight. It is a British government versus the Nigerian government fight,” the passenger said while warning our leaders not to see it as a war between businesses.

Other observers say a war is on already from some established foreign airlines. Said to be leading the pack is expensive, elite British Airways. That should not be a surprise. The lion’s den is never free from bones. A behemoth company with imperialism as its foundational philosophy and ethos cannot be seen brooding any act of impudence from an upstart airline from Africa, its country’s inheritance. The lords on that route take the route as their bequest. Their mindset is rooted in history.

Sir Samuel Hoare was the British Secretary of State for Air from 1922 to 1929. He wrote in his Empire of the Air (1957:90) that he “saw in the creation of air routes the chance of uniting the scattered countries of the (British) Empire and the Commonwealth.” To him (and his country), air travel and route allocations were carefully etched and aimed at making sure that Great Britain did not “surrender in the air a paramountcy won on the ground by a generation before.” In other words, as elegantly couched by Hoare, the official British air travel policy was (and should still be) undergirded by the national desire to “make closer and more constant the unity of imperial thought, imperial intercourse and imperial ideals.”

Direct territorial acquisition of land that is not yours is colonialism. Garnish it with political and economic control from an outside power and you have the textbook definition of imperialism.

Imperial Airways, the grandfather of British Airways, was set up as the “chosen instrument” to achieve England’s imperial agenda. Indeed, The Times of London of December 28, 1923 noted and emphasized that in the choice of name for that airline, ‘Imperial’ and not ‘National’ had been used as its label. For these details and more, I suggest you read (as I did) Robert McCormack’s ‘Airlines and Empires: Great Britain and the Scramble for Africa, 1919-1932 published by the Canadian Journal of African Studies in 1976. You will read in that piece how the first scheduled flight of Imperial Airways on its trunk route to Cape Town on January 20, 1932 was celebrated by a British newspaper as “an imperial event of outstanding importance.”

Ninety years ago (18 October, 1934) at the Chatham House, London, Lt. Colonel H. Burchall, General Manager of Imperial Airways, spoke on ‘The Politics of International Air Routes’. He warned that “any country which maintains regular air services over routes crossing foreign countries has to encounter many difficulties.” He added that of those difficulties, “none is greater than those presented by international politics for these are based upon the uncertain and shifting foundations of national prejudices and aspirations.” You would probably understand Burchall’s words better if you advert your mind to the fact that on that London route used to be Nigeria’s Arik, Medview and Bellview. The gods of the skies swat them; they closed shop.

There is a gush of ground calls for support for Air Peace in this war. They say it is patriotism to do so. Before the coming of Air Peace on the London route, flying became food only for the gods of cash. Virgin Atlantic increased its price for economy class to N2,353,200; its business class was N5,345,700. Turkish airlines’ economy class ticket for the Lagos-Istanbul -London route rose to N874,661 while the business class ticket jumped to N1,980,876. Nigerian travellers experienced same with British Airways, Delta, Lufthansa, KLM/Air France, Air Maroc and Ethiopian Airlines. Nigerians cried, wailed and waited for succour, none came. Air Peace’s entry and cheaper fares have now forced the gods to reconsider their judgement. Reports say the flying spirits have not only reduced their fares, they are weaponising them against the upstart from Lagos. They are charging fares lower than Air Peace’s. That is war, price war.

Every war, including a price war, has an objective. A petrol station manager in the United States tells Strategic Pricing Solutions his own experience: “During the price war my company fought, consumers got some of the lowest gas prices in Dallas, but those low prices could not last. The end result for the consumer in that neighborhood was two of three gas stations on one corner going out of business, and as soon as they closed their doors, the remaining company raised prices higher than ever before.” That is what the dominant birds seek to do to the cattle egret. Their lowered prices are clippers for the wings of the competitor. The news will be very bad if Nigerians buy their guile. The Nigerian flyer will pay if the aliens win.

Those leading this war seek to prevent importation of aviation into their country from Nigeria while exporting theirs to Nigeria. It happened in other sectors, particularly in telecoms. It is still happening. What kind of trade and economic relations opens my door for your goods and closes yours to mine? American economist, William D. Grampp (1914-2019), in his ‘The Third Century of Mercantilism’ (published in the Southern Economic Journal in April 1944) argues that the prohibition of imports should be seen also as a prohibition of exports. This, he argues, is “not only because such protective devices lead to retaliatory measures but because exports must pay for imports and imports must pay for exports.” The greedy does not think so. They do to us here what they won’t accept in their home.

At the beginning of the GSM/mobile telephony story in Nigeria, the two foreign companies licensed to operate here gave everyone pills that were as bitter as their ineffectual properties. Ebenezer Obadare, a professor and researcher, puts it succinctly in his ‘Playing Politics with Mobile Phone in Nigeria’ published in March 2006. Obadare writes that in the first two years of mobile telephony in Nigeria, Nigerians suffered and complained of “exorbitant tariffs, poor reception, frequent and unfavourable changes in contract terms, and arbitrary reduction of credits.” I experienced it.

In 2001, our national minimum wage was N5,500 but they sold their SIM cards for N30,000. I could not afford it – my salary was N21,000. They fixed their call tariff at N50 per. There was no saviour if your one-minute call strayed into 61 seconds -your credit would be down by two minutes and no tear shed would argue your case. A second’s call was a minute’s call and you must pay even if the call dropped. It was so bad that at a point, protesters redefined GSM as an acronym for “Grand Swindling Machine.”

Who were the edá rats behind that odious treatment? Foreigners who thought we deserved no more than slave treatment on our own soil. Obadare’s words are very apposite here. He writes that the foreign telecoms companies’ excuse “had been that it was impossible to offer customers per second billing until they attained ‘reasonable maturity’ or at least three years after the commencement of operations.” He continues: “However, following…. the introduction of Mike Adenuga’s Globacom, which gave its customers the per billing option on 29 August, 2003 (its first day of operation), Econet and MTN had no choice but to follow suit. Yet, they did not do this without attempting to claw something back- subscribers who opted to be billed on the per-second platform were made to pay a switchover fee of N300 each.” Obadare adds that one of the foreign operators offered its customers “100 free texts, many of which, ironically, did not reach their destinations.” Twenty one years after Nigerians defeated them through Globacom’s patriotic intervention, the outsiders have refused to forget. They still work and fight dirty.

They fleece Nigeria and escape sanctions. Their immunity is sourced from Nigeria’s peculiar self-hate and self-neglect. The forex crisis that today ravages Nigerians and Nigerian entities makes no sense to them. They make forex and ship them home to their owners. At a point in the decade before the last, the Central Bank of Nigeria complained loudly that the foreign companies did not allow their cash to stay for more than a few weeks in Nigeria “before they were converted to foreign exchange for one purchase or the other.” Since that decade up till now, their foot has remained slammed on the throttle; they do not think what is wrong is bad.

Do not blame them. Blame Nigeria that does not clothe its own from the ravages of dry winds from outside. If our government would not create heaven for us and for entities that belong to Nigerians, they should at least lead us away from the hell of hostile aliens. In the complex tapestry of adultery and concubinage, the Yoruba say the husband (the child’s father) is the one who runs round to wean his child from death. The man outside – the àlè – does not care if the child dies. The ‘enemy’ are not of here, their love is for where their umbilical cords lie buried. Nigeria is the cow tethered (by us) for them to milk. We think our charity should forever begin from outside. The Arabs say that a borrowed garment will not warm, and if it warms, it will not last.

Does international relations still have reciprocity as a reward for acceptable behaviours and as a check on aberrance? If you scratch my back I should scratch yours. If you take an eye, I take an eye. Why not have Nigerian enterprises in South Africa making what MTN and MutiChoice make here? Why should it be fatal for a Nigerian airline to operate in London when British Airways and Virgin come in here and go out with billions in their pocket? It can’t be sweet if one side picks the bill all the time. It is like subsidy withdrawal by this government of highly subsidized people.
They wring us out in the sink. We are where they put us – spread out in the sun to dry. Their parrot speaks only of received benefits. It does not give.
Contemporary Egyptian-American poet and artist, Suzi Kassem, in her ‘The Unforgiven’ writes on people “who take and don’t give. The kind to whom you give and give, and they keep asking. The kind to whom you give and give and they say you gave nothing. The kind who have never offered anything but act like they’re the ones providing EVERYTHING. The rat that never gives back yet is so quick to attack – because they think the word TAKING seriously means GIVING.”

IN January 2014, a coalition of advocates, including Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN; Jiti Ogunye and Tokunbo Mumuni, both senior lawyers; and I wrote to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, inviting it to “to investigate the allegations of fraud detailed by the two committees set up by President Goodluck Jonathan in the wake of the 2012 fuel subsidy crisis.” It failed to do so. Ten years later, the EFCC is now preoccupied with chasing after cross-dressers. How it got so derailed bears attention.

At the beginning of this past week, Nigerians woke up to the story that a demographic of energy users, described in the language of the industry as “Band A” and constituting roughly about 15% of the approximately 12 million official subscribers to electricity in the country, will have their energy tariffs raised by 230.8%. They claim the four other bands will be unaffected. That’s false. Tariff regulation in the energy sector in Nigeria is the primary responsibility of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, a body created originally under the Electricity Power Sector Reform Act in 2005 which was repealed and replaced in 2023 by the Electricity Act. 

For some time prior to last week, various news media had sought unsuccessfully to confirm from the NERC the veracity of information suggesting that it had reached a decision to upwardly review the electricity tariff or that it had plans to do so. When it broke the story on April 2, Bloomberg, a private and foreign news agency, credited “people in the presidency with knowledge of the matter”, suggesting not only a decision with a long gestation period but also that one that had the active authorization of the presidency. The implication is that when it initially denied to Nigerian news sources that it had such plans, the NERC had dissembled.

The day after the Bloomberg story, on April 3, NERC confirmed the accuracy of the report. On the same day, it released the text of the applicable statutory instrument, dated March 28, which designated the commencement date as April 3. 

The energy minister, Adebayo Adelabu, chimed in, explaining that the decision was because Nigerians keep their deep freezers plugged even when absent from home. This energy minister is so out of touch, he doesn’t know that deep freezers need constant electricity. But how could he when all he does is prance about in private jets.

For context, the Energy Progress Report issued jointly by the International Energy Agency, the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation, among others, in 2022, conservatively assessed over 92 million Nigerians as without access to electricity. This is at the very bottom of the global energy league. The NERC claims that one of its reasons for the secret energy tax is to “attract more investment into Nigeria’s power sector.” This is what one of my old teachers called “future speculative tense.”

For starters, the new tariffs foster undue discrimination contrary to Section 116(2)(e) of the Electricity Act of 2023 which requires the Commission in setting tariffs to “avoid undue discrimination between consumers and consumer categories.”

The principal crisis with energy consumption currently is not generation but transmission. The country is unable to evacuate anything close to what it generates. To achieve an increase in energy supplied to or enjoyed by any band, therefore, the Transmission Company will have to create energy hunger in a band somewhere in the consumption ecosystem. 

So, to increase the quantity of energy supply that it guarantees to the Band A customers, NERC has to ensure reduction in what is transmitted to those at the bottom end of the bands. In other words, the increase of transmission to Band A customers is achieved by eviscerating supply to the roadside vulcanizer, the neighbourhood Mama-Put restauranter, the welder, all of whom will suffer denial of energy.

This pricing strategy is also poorly reasoned. The Band A users whom it supposedly favours are mostly in a position to transfer the burdens of the higher tariffs to consumers, most of whom are in the lower bands. This hits lower band consumers with a double whammy. By imposing energy hunger on them, it threatens the livelihoods of micro, mini and informal entrepreneurs and will put many of them out of business. At the same time, it will increase their costs of consumption. Unable to pay the new prices of goods and services, they will vote with their feet, which will hit revenues, profitability and viability of industry, leading to loss of jobs, loss of tax take and ultimately burdensome social costs. 

What emerges is that the new tariffs are effectively a regressive energy tax on the poor. In a country already afflicted with prohibitive insecurity, even further rise in insecurity is foreseeable.

It became clear also during the week that NERC chose to adopt this most consequential of decisions for citizens, employers and consumers in utmost secrecy. To preclude predictable public furore about it, the NERC also garlanded the decision making with a bodyguard of lies. Not satisfied with this, the release of the statutory instrument coincided with a pattern of coordinated online behaviour which clearly suggested that the Commission had actively recruited a gang of digital influencers and bloggers in order to create maximum distraction from the measure.

One source of such distraction was the EFCC. As the NERC rolled out this prohibitive energy tax on April 3, the EFCC procured the high profile arrest of Idris Okuneye, a transactional transvestite, better known as Bobrisky, on impressive charges of “abuse of the Naira” and alleged money laundering. With unremitting alacrity, the Commission first paraded Bobrisky, a practice that has repeatedly been declared unlawful by courts in Nigeria. Thereafter, they arraigned him before the Federal High Court in Lagos. 

The law that establishes the EFCC defines “economic and financial crimes” to mean “non-violent criminal and illicit activity committed with the objectives of earning wealth illegally either individually or in a group or organized manner thereby violating existing legislation governing the economic activities of government and its administration.” At the court, the EFCC dropped the two counts relating to money laundering, ultimately charging Bobrisky only with crimes connected with so-called “abuse of the Naira.”  

Having dropped the only charges that could remotely fall within the purview of economic or financial crime, the EFCC forfeited any claim to acting within the law or in the public interest because abuse of the Naira, whatever that means, is outside the statutory scope of crimes that it can prosecute. Yet, in a mere 48 hours, the EFCC processed Bobrisky through the entire gamut of criminal justice from arrest to conviction, setting a Nigerian record in prosecutorial diligence.

It becomes evident, therefore, that the charges against Bobrisky were an artifice for persecuting a person whose life choices are a tad unusual. The EFCC lent itself to this despite the fact that Lagos, where Bobrisky lives, decriminalized the Victorian crimes of “unnatural offences” long ago in 2011. Nor does the leadership of the EFCC remember that over half a century ago, Uzoma Odimara freely promenaded as a cross-dresser and entertainer around the country under the name “Area Scatter”.

In the week in which the EFCC bungled and threw the biggest corruption case in the country in a quarter of a century, it takes unique institutional commitment to frippery to reduce its core business to chasing cross-dressers. In targeting Bobrisky as it has, the EFCC arguably sought to achieve the twin objectives of distracting Nigerians from the NERC’s steep and unlawful energy tax while at the same time pressing home a blinkered wedge advocacy. 

In so doing, the leadership of the Commission clearly abused the sacred instrument of prosecutorial prerogative and showed itself as either idle or misguided, if not both. When this was brought to their attention, they descended into threats, bluster and cringe-worthy trade in mangled adjectives. One concerned citizen responded that “EFCC has gone rogue.” 

Ten years ago, citizens looked to them as part of the solution. Today the EFCC has become part of the problem.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

THE year 1984 was quite a trying one for the country. The military, which had five years before, handed over power to civilian leaders, had returned like a badly treated Miliary Tuberculosis. It was on rampage, smashing all other powers in the country. To deal with the press, the regime, led by the duo of Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon, issued Decree 4 of 1984 under which falsehood and truth were punishable offences.

It adopted terror as state policy. For instance, it introduced a War Against Indiscipline, WAI, campaign in which Nigerians were given corporal punishment on the streets not based on any investigation or trial, but the whims and caprices of soldiers and security agents. Student unions were smashed and some of their leaders like Lanre Arogundade, then President of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, were abducted on the streets.

Also, retroactive decrees carrying the death penalty on cases like drug trafficking, were enacted and executed. Nigeria was in a war declared by the military Generals on the populace. However, the regime found the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, a formidable foe and tried various means of conquering it. It saw the 1984 NLC election as an opportunity to take over the Congress. But the leading candidate was a stubborn radical, John Enas Dubre. So, pro-state unionists got a court injunction disqualifying him. But rather than allow state agents to take over the Congress, the radical unions swung support to an honest but obstinate Ali Chiroma. He won the election.

Chiroma’s non-radical posture, his being the Principal, School of Health Technology, Maiduguri and, his quiet disposition, seemed to have suited the regime. But the country was in for a shock as he came out fighting, boldly leading workers and refusing to back down. The Chiroma leadership demanded that the regime stopped its mindless mass retrenchment of workers and, delayed payment of salaries. It rejected the ban on strikes insisting that workers have a fundamental right to work or refuse to work. It defended the student movement and rejected the ban on cafeteria system. It sided with the press against the regime. Chiroma publicly demonstrated this by personally attending sessions of the Decree 4 trials of the ‘Guardian Newspaper’ journalists, Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson.

The nation heaved a sigh of relief when a palace coup on August 27,1985 swept away the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship. Although the new leadership of General Ibrahim Babangida was more subtle, it turned out to be deadlier. When the regime tilted towards taking an International Monetary Fund, IMF, loan and its enslaving conditionalities, the NLC under Chiroma led the populace against it.

Babangida publicly announced the IMF rejection by the overwhelming majority of Nigerians in his December 13, 1985 broadcast. However, the regime went on to take the loan and implement the IMF dictates as the Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP. Chiroma led labour to reject it and refused to back down even when the regime decreed that as far as SAP goes, There Is No Alternative, TINA.

The regime also made opposition to SAP, a crime. Chiroma rejected this, fought against privatisation and the increases in prices of petroleum products. For these, he and labour leaders like Dr Lasisi Osunde were detained without trial.

In leading the opposition to SAP, Chiroma said it is like a Kanuri proverb which says: “If you dig a hole to fill a hole, you have one more hole to fill.” In other words, that is a fruitless and destructive endeavour. He was right. Today, 38 years later, Nigeria is still suffering from the cancerous radiation effects of the IMF-imposed programmes. The IMF was actually a quack doctor administering the same drugs on all patients irrespective of their ailments. In 2015, in its quarterly magazine ‘Finance and Development’  the institution apologised, saying: “The IMF is unconditionally saying sorry for its dogged insistence, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s that countries’ capital accounts needed to be liberalized…We now know that much of that research was useless- no more useful than the types of studies that say homeopathy works…The other culpa is the insistence on austerity.”

So, perceptive leaders with common sense like Chiroma were right, and their tormentors were wrong. Yet, Babangida has not apologised for ruining Nigeria with SAP and, the useless but highly toxic austerity measures. Another arena of confrontation between the Chiroma leadership and the regime, was over draconian labour laws, especially those that prescribed life sentence or death penalty for striking workers. This was threatened against striking National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, NUPENG, members in May 1986, and later, used in sentencing 11 electricity workers for going on strike from October 5-8, 1988.

Back in 1986, the military regime accused Chiroma of trying to overthrow it. This followed the Friday, May 23, 1986 massacre of students and other citizens at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. The regime established a panel of inquiry headed by Major General Emmanuel Abisoye and, appointed the NLC into the panel. But the Chiroma leadership rejected the appointment, insisting that arrested students must first be released and that those directly responsible for the killings should be suspended from office. The NLC then mobilised the public for a Day of National Mourning slated for June 4, 1986. The regime banned the NLC demonstration. Its propagandists claimed the date was an attempt to replicate the June 4, 1979 Rawlings coup in Ghana.

Chiroma responded that the regime’s mobilization “is an all-out war, by land, sea and air, against unarmed workers”. On the eve of the protests, Chiroma, his lieutenants and many activists were seized and detained nationwide. The NLC headquarters and its offices in the states were occupied by armed security men with the army deployed on the streets of Lagos and Kano.

When Chiroma sought re-election at the 1988 NLC Conference in Benin, the Babangida regime decided to stop him. First, it paid up all the outstanding NLC affiliation fees owed by the pro-government ‘Democrat’ unions in order to shore up their votes. When it realised that even this will not give it victory, the regime’s preferred candidate, Takai Shamang and his group, boycotted the NLC Conference but declared themselves elected.

When Chiroma was re-elected, Babangida immediately issued a decree removing his leadership and imposing an employer, Michael Ogunkoya, as NLC Sole Administrator. When the regime ordered Chiroma to handover to Ogunkoya, he, uncharacteristically, did not consult his comrades before doing so. There was also the issue whether it was appropriate for him to have accepted to be the Sole Administrator of NUPENG after General Sani Abacha banned its leadership.

Over the years, Chiroma continued to side with the populace until his departure on Tuesday, April 2, 2024.