
OTHERS' VIEWS
[OPINION] Lawful Procedures for Actualising a People's Constitution For Nigeria - Mike Ozekhome, SAN
AdminTHE NEVER-ENDING CALL FOR A NEW PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION
The Constitution is the birth certificate and identity card of a Nation. It mirrors the values and aspirations of a people. Such a supreme document is not a mere law or legislation that is crafted by the NASS. Neither the NASS nor the government that can give the Nigerian Nation a constitution. Rather, it is the Constitution that gives the Nation a government, because it is based on the will of the people. It is the dog that wags the tail; the tail does not wag the dog. In the halls of the Green Chamber, sixty legislators, transcending party lines have only recently advocated for a transition from a presidential to a parliamentary system of government. Simultaneously, the Senate also convened a 43-member panel on Constitution review. These steps to me should be used as an auspicious moment to consider how best to fashion out a truly representative people's Constitution.
The never-ending call for a new Constitution arises from a recognition of the inherent fundamental shortcomings of the present unitary and lop-sided system, which is anything but federalist. Mere amendments to or replacements of the Constitution under sections 8 and 9 therefore, would be akin to merely applying a superficial remedy to a deep-rooted ailment. It simply cannot and will not work. I humbly submit, as I have done since the year 2000, that one million amendments multiplied by another million amendments, with the addition of yet another million amendments, will never work. Merely chopping off the branches of a tree without cutting off the taproot will never kill such a tree. It is akin to merely treating the symptoms of a serious disease. Just as one cannot cure cancer with medication meant for minor skin conditions, the need for a new beginning is dire. This is because the process and procedure for crafting a new Constitution must be democratic and all inclusive, as they are more important than the contents of the Constitution themselves. The simple reason is that it is such procedure or process that confers legitimacy, credibility and acceptability on the supreme document called Constitution.
WHY THE 1999 CONSTITUTION IS ILLEGITIMATE
The fact that a dictatorial and autocratic military junta imposed the 1999 Constitution completely robs it of its legitimacy, credibility and acceptability, as it does not represent the nation’s Identity Card, covenant and the supreme will of the Nigerian people, which are what a Constitution highlights. Though a Constitution may be initiated through or amended by parliament, the final and decisive act of promulgation is strictly reserved for the people through a referendum. It is this act that confers autochthony, ownership, legitimacy and credibility on the document called a Constitution. The 1999 Unitary Constitution of Nigeria lacks all these attributes. It is a schedule attached to the Decree No. 24 of 1999. The 1999 elections were held without a Constitution. The Constitution therefore tells a lie in its preamble by proclaiming its existence with “we the people of Nigeria”. The Nigerian people never gave us such a Constitution through a referendum.
SOME PROCEDURES FOR BRINGING ABOUT A PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION
- PROFESSOR BEN NWABUEZE’S SEMINAL THESIS
In a seminar writeup titled "Legal Authority for the Convening and Holding of a National Conference and for the Making of a People’s Constitution," Professor Ben Nwabueze, SAN, NNOM, widely regarded as Africa's pre-eminent and foremost constitutional lawyer, delved into the mechanisms for bringing about a people's Constitution through the National Assembly. He asserts that the National Assembly's power to enact legislation for convening and conducting a National Conference is rooted in its authority to "alter" the Constitution as conferred by sections 8 and 9.
Professor Nwabueze contends that while the power to "alter" does not inherently imply the power to replace, the National Assembly's authority extends beyond alteration vide sections 8 and 9. He highlights the enactment of the 1999 Constitution via Decree 24 and advocates a repeal of section 1(1) this Decree as a means of abolishing the existing Constitution and simultaneously instituting a new one. He drew parallels to the 1963 method in the making of the 1963 Republican Constitution to replace the 1960 Independence Constitution which was established in section 2 of a Schedule to the British Government’s Order-In-Council.
Furthermore, he argued that the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Promulgation) Decree 1999, qualifies as an "existing law" within the meaning of section 315(4) of the 1999 Constitution, thereby subject to repeal by the National Assembly. Professor Nwabueze maintained that such legislative actions are within the purview of the Legislature, ensuring coherence and conformity with constitutional principles.
In essence, Professor Nwabueze's discourse underscores the National Assembly's dual capacity as both a federal legislative body and the supreme legislative authority for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, affirming its prerogative to effect constitutional changes in alignment with democratic principles.
THE ISSUE WITH PROFESSOR NWABUEZE’S BRILLIANT THESIS
Late Professor Nwabueze’s thesis is a beautiful and attractive intellectual piece of discourse, resonating in its breadth and depth. However, it still fails to answer the critical question: does the mere yanking off of Decree 24 which promulgated the Constitution, and simultaneous replacement of the 1999 Constitution through repealment of section 1(1) of Decree 24 amounts to the enactment of a brand-new Constitution to replace the present 1999 Constitution? Does it cure it of its “original sin” of lack of autochthony? Does it amount to making it the people’s Constitution when same is replete with fallacies and inconsistencies, having been militarily imposed by a little clique of military dictators as a mere schedule attached to Decree No 24 of 1999? Did this tiny clique represent “We the People of Nigeria” as the preamble to the 1999 Constitution falsely states? I think not. Can an illness be cured by attacking the symptoms? This is where the issue of a referendum comes in.
- PROCEDURE THROUGH ADOPTION OF THE 2014 CONFERENCE REPORT
To have an autochthonous Constitution that derives its legitimacy from the Nigerian people, we may need to look at the 2014 National Conference, (where I was a member and headed the subcommittee on Constitution drafting, human rights and legal reforms). The Committee made appropriate recommendations regarding bringing about a people’s Constitution. The said over 600 recommendations were subjected to the plenary session, hotly debated and consensually agreed upon and adopted. It was agreed that there was the need to have a totally brand new Constitution for the people of Nigeria. The 492 members that were at the National Conference represented all strata and walks of life of the Nigerian people – the Federal Government, States, LGAs, Labour; trade unions; physically challenged; youth; students; Civil Society; market men and women; professionals; technocrats; military; Police; civilians; traditional rulers; educationists; members of the diplomatic corps; private and public sectors; etc. Some people have argued (and with some strong reasons too), that the 2014 National Conference was not representative of the people because the delegates were not elected. The simple answer is that aside the fact that the delegates were all thrown up by the entire Nigerian people – States, LGAs, Civil Society, Market men and women, professionals, the physically challenged, technocrats, youths, students, Labour and Trade Unions – the question of representation was a sore issue at the Conference. It was hotly debated. After many days of arguments, and counter-arguments, it was finally agreed by way of consensus that the 2014 National Conference delegates constituted the true and correct representatives of the Nigerian people. These delegates certainly constituted plurality of representatives of the Nigerian people more than the 28 members of General Abdusalami’s tiny military oligarchy that promulgated Decree 24 of 1999, to usher in the present 1999 Constitution. However, the point must be made that the NASS having been voted into office by the Nigerian people without a Constitution (since the elections predated the 1999 Constitution), can promulgate a law that subjects these over 600 recommendations to a referendum of the people through an appropriate agency. I shall anon state how this can be done.
The 2014 National Conference surely passed for a Constituent Assembly also known as a Constitutional Convention, Constitutional Congress, or Constitutional Assembly. Members of such a Constituent Assembly may be elected by popular vote, drawn by sortition, appointed, or some combination of these methods, as was the case of the 2014 National Conference. Assemblies are typically considered distinct from a regular legislature. A Constitutional Convention or a Constituent Assembly, is usually set up for its specific purpose, which it carries out in a relatively short time, after which the Assembly is dissolved. A Constituent Assembly is a form of representative democracy. This was what happened in 2014 with the National Conference which was a Constituent Assembly of the Nigerian people.
WHAT IS A NATIONAL CONFERENCE?
A National Conference serves as a public platform for representatives from diverse political and civic groups to discuss and formulate a consensus-based plan for the country's political future. Despite its commitment to inclusivity, participation in a national conference doesn't assure immediate political freedom or power-sharing. These conferences, predominantly observed in Francophone Africa from 1990 to 1993, played a pivotal role in transitioning from one-party systems to peaceful alternations of power.
OBJECTIVES OF A NATIONAL CONFERENCE
The multifaceted objectives of a national conference include preventing conflicts, building national consensus, negotiating democratic transitions, establishing new rules and institutions, legalizing multipartism, drafting new constitutions, and facilitating a peaceful alternation of power. These conferences bolster citizens' support for state institutions, reduce internal destabilizing factors, and level the playing field by recognizing the government's inability to maintain the status quo.
It should be noted that the terms "National Conference" and "Sovereign National Conference" are often used interchangeably, but their precise meanings can depend on the context. In a general sense, both terms refer to gatherings or assemblies where representatives discuss and deliberate on important national issues. However, there can be nuances in their usage. While a national conference is a broad term indicating a gathering or meeting of representatives from various segments of society to discuss matters of national importance and may involve discussions on political, social, economic, or constitutional issues (as in the 2014 National Conference), a Sovereign National Conference emphasizes a higher degree of independence and authority for the conference. In some contexts, a SNC implies that the gathering has the supreme power to make decisions without external influence or interference.
EXAMPLES OF NATIONAL CONFERENCE FROM FRANCOPHONE AFRICA
The following Francophone countries are examples of the impact of national conferences highlighting its role in managing conflicts and fostering political dialogue amid significant political changes.
- Benin:
Amidst turmoil in 1989, a 1990 National Conference challenged President Mathieu Kérékou's authority, leading to the suspension of the constitution. This facilitated a democratic transition, including multi-party elections and a new prime minister.
- Congo (Brazzaville):
Facing economic decline, Congo (Brazzaville) witnessed a erosion of single-party rule. A 1991 National Conference compelled President Denis Sassou-Nguesso to yield to the opposition, resulting in a new constitution and multi-party elections. However, Sassou-Nguesso's return in 1997 ended this democratic period.
- Mali:
After President Ibrahim Traoré's ousting in 1991, Mali convened a National Conference focused on crafting a new constitution. This consensus-building process led to the adoption of a new constitution in 1992, paving the way for multi-party systems and democratic elections.
- Togo:
Demands for democratization in 1990 spurred a National Conference in Togo, challenging President Gnassingbe Eyadéma's regime. Despite initial opposition, Eyadéma retained control, resulting in the collapse of the democratic experiment by 1997–1998.
- Democratic Republic of Congo:
During President Mobutu Sese Seko's rule, allowing opposition parties in the early 1990s signaled change. The 1991–1992 National Conference expanded political space, but failed to achieve a complete transition to democracy in what became the Democratic Republic of Congo.
THE 1991 IBB NATIONAL CONFERENCE AS A CASE STUDY
The IBB conference of 1991 under the auspices of the then military-led government of General Ibrahim Babangida suffered some predetermined government nuances with certain “no-go” areas specified for the conferees. There was palpable government interference and influence even in the nomination process that had 96 government delegates out of a total of 369.
In stark contrast, the 2014 National conference was totally independent of government control. I was a member; so I should know.
- PROCEDURE THROUGH THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
No one is saying the NASS will be ignored in the process of bringing about a new people’s Constitution through a referendum. It is the NASS that must pass an Act, relying on and using the provisions of sections 4,8,9,13 and 14 and 315 of the 1999 Constitution; and, Items 47, 67 and 68 of Part 1 to the Second Schedule of the Exclusive Legislative List. It can use these sections to make and amend laws for the peace, order and good government of the Federation.
Thus, the 2014 National Conference surely served such a Constituent Assembly of the Nigerian people. There is therefore no further need to dissipate energy, waste scarce resources and time to convoke yet another Delegates Conference or Constituent Assembly that will gulp billions of naira in this austere period. All we need to do at this stage is to aggregate the 2014 National Conference report with the condensed recommendations made by the Senate and House of Representative Committees on Constitutional amendment, and the salient provisions of the 1963 Republican Constitution and refer them to the NRC to activate a referendum of the Nigerian people. This will enable it command the people’s respect, legitimacy, acceptability and credibility. The emergent product becomes a people’s Constitution. To carry out this exercise is not rocket science. It can be executed with the urgency of yesterday, through the appropriate processes of first, second and third reading in the respective Houses within few days of a bill to that effect. Thus, it is recommended that the NASS should take the following urgent steps to promulgate a New People’s Constitution for Nigerians:
PROCEDURAL STEPS TO BE TAKEN BY THE NASS IN MIDWIFING A PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION
- Section 14(2) of the 1999 Constitution provides that sovereignty belongs to the Nigerian people (not the NASS). The present NASS was itself elected by the said Nigerian People even before the coming into being of the 1999 Constitution. Therefore, to abate their fear of being rendered irrelevant in the process of midwifing a new peoples Constitution, the NASS shall be deeply involved in facilitating the process of the emergence of a brand-new Constitution from its present constitutional review exercise. It its law-making function it can set up a National Referendum Commission (NRC), to drive and actualize the process of a new Constitution through a referendum of the Nigerian people emanating from the 2014 National Conference recommendations; present review by the NASS and desired provisions of the 1963 Republican Constitution. The version of the National Referendum Commission (NRC) was what Iraq termed Constitutional Referendum (2005); Constitutional Assembly by (South Africa, 1996); Constitutional Commission (Eritrea, 1994); Constitutional Convention (USA, 1776).
- It is this National Referendum Commission (NRC), thus provided for by an Act of the NASS under sections 4, 8, 9 and 14 that will collate the recommendations of the present Constitutional Review Committees set up by the NASS; the 2014 National Conference lofty recommendations and some relevant provisions of the 1963 Republican Constitution. The entire process shall be driven by the National Referendum Commission already set up by an Act of the NASS.
- This Act enacting the NRC shall also make provisions for a referendum of the people. What the NASS therefore does is to simply catalyse, aid and energise the entire process of the NRC’s collated final draft which the same NRC then subjects to a referendum of the Nigerian people. The referendum is predicated on the emergent draft as collated and propelled by the National Referendum Commission (NRC). The about 374 ethnic groups of Nigeria (Prof. Oniga Otite) will have opportunity through a referendum to speak to the proposed Constitution.
- The collated draft version shall thus be voted on by Nigerians during a popular referendum in a manner already prescribed by the NASS, in the form of “AYES” or “NAYS”. The emergent Constitutional draft thus becomes the outcome of the will of the people.
- With this, the new emergent draft of the Constitution becomes autochthonous, indigenous, legitimate, credible and owned by the people.
- The NRC can, in its collated draft include the new clamour for re-introduction of the Parliamentary system of government as done in Bangladesh on 15th September, 1991. It is left for the Nigerian people to accept or reject this during the proposed referendum.
- All these can be done within a space of a mere six months.
- The President then PROCLAIMS this document into a New Constitution, using his executive powers under section 5 of the Constitution.
- With this, the new document (Constitution) can truly proclaim, “WE THE PEOPLE OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA…DO HEREBY MAKE AND GIVE TO OURSELVES the following Constitution”.
- The NASS should therefore eschew its understandable fears of being ignored, side-lined, or marginalized in the emerging constitutional scenario. It is actually the main organ and engine room that drives the entire process of how a National Referendum Commission facilitates a referendum of the Nigerian people through its draft collated from the sources earlier highlighted.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A REFERENDUM
WHAT IS A REFERENDUM?
A referendum is popularly known as a system where the electorate body (voters or citizens of a country) through a ballot approve or reject an act of the legislature. This posits referendum as the practice of submitting to popular vote of the people passed on or proposed by a legislative body or by popular initiative.[2] It is one of the truest ways of ensuring citizens take part in the decision-making process that shapes the future and fate of their country. A referendum is a general vote by the electorate usually taking the form of yes (Ayes) and no (nays) votes of the populace on a single political question which has been referred to them for a direct decision. This may result in the adoption of a new policy or specific law.[3] A constitutional referendum is thus a form of referendum where a popular vote is cast for the adoption or amendment of a Constitution, by members of the electorate. A referendum enables the people to negotiate, agree, express their desires, which may ultimately be different from that of the political ruling class.
COUNTRIES THAT SUBJECTED THEIR NEW CONSTITUTIONS TO CITIZENS’ REFERENDUM
IRAQ
The first Monarchial Constitution of the Republic of Iraq came into force in 1925 and existed till the 1958 Revolution which established a Republic. Interim Constitutions were adopted in 1958, 1964, 1968, and 1970, until the Transitional Administrative Law was adopted in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In 1990, a draft Constitution was prepared but never promulgated due to the onset of the Gulf War. The current Constitution was adopted on September 18, 2005, by the Transitional National Assembly of Iraq, and confirmed by a Constitutional Referendum, held on October 15, 2005. It was published on December 28, 2005, in the Official Gazette of Iraq (No. 4012), in Arabic original, and thus came into force.
KENYA
There were three versions of the Kenya Constitution; with the most recent being the 2010 redraft. This replaced the 1963 Independence Constitution. This version of 2010 was presented to the Attorney-General of Kenya on 7th April, 2010, officially published on 6th May, 2010, and was subjected to Referendum of the Kenya people on 4th August, 2010. It was voted for and approved by 67% of Kenya citizens. It was then promulgated on 27th August, 2010.
SOUTH AFRICA
After the elections of 1994, the new Parliament (working as the Constitutional Assembly) began writing the final Constitution of South Africa. On May 8, 1996, the Constitutional Assembly completed two years of work on a draft of a final Constitution, replaced the interim Constitution of 1993 by the year 1999. The objective to submit the draft to the Constitution Court was to ensure that the final Constitution was legitimate, credible and accepted by all South Africans.
The process of drafting involved many South Africans in the largest public participation programme ever carried out. Nearly two years later, representatives of political parties negotiated the formulations contained in the final draft and ignited an integration of ideas from ordinary citizens, civil society and political parties represented in and outside of the Constitutional Assembly. The Constitution therefore represents the collective wisdom and will of the South African people because it was arrived at by general agreement and consent of all South Africans.
IRAN
A proposed new Constitution which would make Iran an Islamic Republic, introduce direct elections for the presidency, create a unicameral parliament and require any constitutional changes to go a referendum was proposed by the Iranian Government. To bring this about, a constitutional referendum was held in Iran on 2nd and 3rd December, 1979. The new Islamic constitution was approved by 99.5% of voters at the Referendum.
BANGLADESH
A constitutional referendum was held in Bangladesh on 15th September, 1991. Voters were asked "Should or not the President assent to the Constitution (Twelfth Amendment) Bill, 1991 of the People's Republic of Bangladesh?" The amendments altered the existing Constitution and reintroduced of Parliamentary system of government. It also abolished the position of Vice-President and provided that the President be elected by Parliament. 83.6% of Bangladeshis voted in the referendum, with a turnout of 35.2%.
MOROCCO
A referendum on constitutional reforms was held in Morocco on 1st July, 2011. It was called in response to a series of protests that spread across Morocco which had begun on 20th February, 2011, when over ten thousand Moroccans took to the streets in massive demonstrations demanding democratic reforms. A Commission was set up to draft proposals by June, 2011. A draft was released on 17th June, 2011, which brought about fundamental changes upon people’s referendum.
EGYPT
In October, 2012, the Egyptian Constituent Assembly announced that its first draft of a new Constitution and launched a public awareness campaign called “Know your Constitution”, to educate the public. On November 29, 2012, the Egyptian Constituent Assembly finalized the drafting process of a new Egyptian Constitution. One week later, on December 8, 2012, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi issued a new constitutional declaration announcing that the constitutional draft would be voted on in a national referendum. In accordance with article 60 of the Transitional Constitutional Declaration of March 2011, a special Judicial Commission was formed to supervise the referendum process and monitor vote counting. The referendum took place in two rounds on two different dates: December 15 and 22, 2012. The majority of Egyptians thus voted in favour of the newly drafted Constitution in a popular National Referendum, a Constitution that brought about profound reforms.
ERITREA
The Eritrea’s Proclamation 55/1994 established a Constitutional Commission which organized popular participation in the process of a new Constitution. The Commission members and more than four hundred specially trained teachers instructed the public on constitutional issues and related political and social questions using local vernaculars. The process took three years to solicit the views of a broad cross section of Eritreans. The participation of a majority of Eritreans gave the people a “sense of ownership of the Constitution”.
TUNISIA
Tunisia's first modern Constitution was the fundamental pact of 1857. This was followed by the Constitution of 1861, which was replaced in 1956, after the departure of French administrators in 1956. It was adopted on 1st June, 1959 and amended in 1999 and 2002, after the Tunisian Constitutional Referendum of 2002. Following the revolution and months of protests, a Constituent Assembly drafted a new Constitution in 2014, adopted on 26th January, 2014 after a referendum.
THE AMERICAN EXAMPLE OF A PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION THROUGH A REFERENDUM
The birth of American independence in 1776 saw the convening of a Constitutional Convention under George Washington's leadership from May 14 to September 17, 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fifty-five delegates, representing autonomous Confederates, convened with the aspiration of forging a "more perfect union," engaging in passionate debates over the framework of the new nation.
Similarly, between May and September 1787, fifty American Confederate representatives gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to deliberate on achieving a "more perfect Union" following independence from Britain in 1777. Thirty-nine out of the fifty-five delegates endorsed and ratified a new Constitution starting in December 1787. Through a referendum held on June 21, 1778, initially eleven and later thirteen states adopted and ratified it, paving the way for the establishment of a new government on March 4, 1789.
This new Constitution delineated key governmental principles to supersede the earlier Articles of Confederation, embracing Republicanism, Federalism, Presidentialism, and Judicial review. Inspired by the doctrine of separation of powers elucidated by French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu in 1748, they incorporated features such as a Bill of Rights, Bicameral Legislature, Electoral College, Executive Presidency, and a Judiciary comprising Supreme, Circuit, and District Courts.
Notably, the Constitutional Convention gave rise to luminaries like Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, and Washington, who assumed the presidency. Revered as a product of the people, the American Constitution spans a mere 192 pages, with 27 amendments, encapsulating a concise 7,591 words—a testament to its revered stature among the American populace. This stands in stark contrast to the figurative "briefcase-like" bulk of the Nigerian Constitution.
In a global context, the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787 remains a poignant example, where delegates from thirteen states converged to address the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, laying the groundwork for enduring governmental principles that have withstood the test of time.
OTHER COUNTRIES THAT USED REFERENDUM TO GALVANISE THEIR PEOPLE
Referendum thus simply means that the people are made to buy into an idea and own it. This occurred when a new Constitution emerged from the people of the then Midwest region on the 10th of August, 1963, to be separated from Western region, through a popular referendum. Heavens did not fall. There are other examples. The Eritrean separated from Ethiopia with a people’s referendum.
Many other countries of the world fashioned out new Constitutions after their people’s referendum. Such examples can be found with the people of Indonesia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Sweden, East Timor, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Russia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, France and Germany. Others are Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Romania, Spain, Slovenia, Ukraine, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Australia, Uruguay, New Zealand, etc. The people of Norway (53.5%) in a referendum in 1972, voted against being part of the European Economic Community in a referendum, without any provision for such a referendum in their Constitution. The same Norwegians in January, 1994, in a referendum of 52.2% of the people, rejected membership of the European Union (EU). On 23rd June, 2016, the people of UK voted to exit EU in the EU Referendum, also known as BREXIT Referendum.[4]
So, we need a BRAND-NEW CONSTITUTION and it can be done. We do not need to merely amend the present Constitution using section 9, or replace the parent Decree with either existing Constitution because it will never work. Rather, we need a BRAND-NEW CONSTITUTION that is autochthonous, legitimate, indigenous, and people-driven. This will enable it command the Peoples respect, legitimacy, acceptability and credibility.
EXPECTED INNOVATIONS IN A NEW PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION AND THE IMPERATIVES OF RESTRUCTURING
Restructuring is meant to make the Nigeria project work better and give a sense of belonging to all persons in Nigeria. It is meant to overhaul the current polity by giving power back to the people through their elected; rework a new Constitution that truly reflects their aspirations; address the peculiar needs of the federating units; and, resolve and restore true fiscal federalism. It is meant to afford minority groups a sense of National Identity; afford them control over their natural resources; allow them establish their own Court systems, Police Forces and Community Policing Systems; give them maximum security; afford them a fair and effective political structure; and allow the people develop according to their desire and pace; while paying a fair tax to the central Government to enable it oversee limited areas of jurisdiction within the exclusive Legislative list. To achieve such restructuring of Nigeria, I hereby make the following humble recommendations:
- We need a fresh people’s Constitution anchored on a six-zonal federal structure, with the present states, still retained as federating units, thus having a two-tier system of Government.
- There shall be a central Federal Constitution, whose provisions shall prevail in the event of a conflict with the provisions of States and sub-regional Constitutions.
- Each State shall maintain its own Constitution, have its own Police Force, and its hierarchy of courts up to the Supreme Court.
- Each sub-regional group (Geopolitical Zone) shall have a Supreme Court that entertains appeals from the Supreme Courts of States within the sub-Regions, as was with the Western Region Court of Appeal. Only serious matters of Constitutional importance between States and States, and between States and the Federal Government shall go to the Supreme Court of Nigeria in Abuja, in like manner of the US Supreme Court.
- Abolish section 162(4) – (8) of the Constitution and allow each State to be free to merge existing LGCs or create fresh LGCs, depending on its needs and financial capability. Such LGCs shall be made autonomous and not dependent on State Governors.
- Each of the federating states shall fully control its own resources up to 100% resources and pay 30% of revenue generated from these resources to the central government to enable it take care of its fewer allotted functions. In a proper federation, the central government does not own the resources and then allocate or dole out revenues to the sub-national units. It is the other way round. This was the position under the 1963 Republican Constitution, true fiscal federalism set up that allowed states to own their resources, pay tax to the central Government and develop according to their pace and needs. Let states begin to bake, and not merely share the National Cake.
- Separate the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation from the highly political office of the Minister of Justice.
- Separate the office of the Accountant-General of the Federation from that of the Accountant-General of the Federal Government.
- Enthrone participation by vulnerable groups in governance, and bring about gender equality through a clearly defined Affirmative action.
- Abrogate one chamber of the NASS (360 House of Representatives members; 109 Senators are too much for Nigeria). Or, allow existing members to sit on part-time and get paid sitting allowances.
- Maintain Nigeria’s secularity and Governments must hand off religious matters and pilgrimages.
- Remove the immunity clause in prima facie criminal offences for the offices of President, Vice President, Governor and Deputy Governor while in office. This will stop their criminal proxy activities.
- Bring about rotation of power between the North and the South.
- Make provision for independent candidature.
- Create specific Constitutional and Anti-Corruption courts.
- Revamp the electoral process; Allow transparent counting of votes and allow the votes to count.
- Enable funding of members of the NASS by constituent States.
- Create a specific constitutional role for traditional rulers and the traditional institution. They are the nearest units to the grassroots.
- Reform the Judiciary by banning mere interlocutory appeals to the Supreme Court and demarcating clearly between pre- and post-election matters. Halt the process of courts conceiving, incubating and delivering Presidents, Governors, Legislators, Chairmen of LGCs and Councilors.
- Remove the artificial discrimination inherent citizenship, indigeneship and
- Provide for clearly defined timelines for initiating assenting to and passing bills by all Legislatures in Nigeria.
- Whittle down the entire bureaucracy in all the three arms of Government in Nigeria.
- Make justiciable and actionable in a court of law, the entire provisions of Chapter II of the Constitution deal with socio-economic rights.
- Constitutionalize electoral Reforms and punish electoral offences, including banning for 10 years, politicians that are involved in, or who instigate electoral crimes.
- Prune down the Exclusive Legislative list of the Federal to few matters concerning Aviation Policy and Regulations; Banking, Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes; Citizenship, Naturalization and Aliens; Creation of States; Currency, Coinage and Legal Tender; Customs Duties; Foreign and External Affairs; Defence and Defence Matters; Immigration into and Emigration Matters; Nuclear Energy; Ownership of and Control over Educational Matters that border on Federal Tertiary and Research Institutions.
CONCLUSION
THE WAY FORWARD
Finally, evolving development around the globe points clearly to the fact that promotion, respect and preservation of tenets of the rule of law are not only desirable, but are mandatory requirements to ensure a peaceful and civil human society.[5] Executive lawlessness or rascality shall be prohibited by the Constitution. It is very important that the powers of every arm of government to act against the citizen is not stimulated by whims and caprices of the controller of such powers, but only to the extent authorized by the Constitution.[6] The right of every man and woman to have his inalienable rights respected and removed from privations under any guise is God-given and must be taken as such. It is now a compelling necessity that both the governor and the governed must be subjected to the rule of law.[7] The rule of law must therefore be protected by the Constitution. The government should also abide by the law and act within its confines to ensure peace, stability and welfare of the general public.
Democracy must also be rooted in the Constitution. The people should be given a clear voice and mandate to manage the affairs of the nation, through appropriate measures of free and fair elections, and checks and balances. The people should be given the rights of access to information, participation in decision making process and access to justice. Democracy needs to take significance over politics in Nigeria, and oust the current practice of election malpractices which prevent free and fair elections. Democracy and Rule of Law need to be revived once again in Nigeria, and that cannot be done merely by amending the present Constitution. Rather, the present Constitution must be discarded with, and a fresh new Constitution created through a referendum of the people as midwife by the NRC enacted into law by the NASS.
One cannot amend a bad document; it is simply not possible. An illegitimate document remains illegitimate forever. The present Nigerian Constitution is a child of bastardy and nothing can cure it. Even one million amendments multiplied by another million amendments can never cure the present Constitution of Nigeria of its original sin of its illegitimacy. Albert Einstein once said that “it is only a mad man that seeks to get different results by using the same methods that he has been using when a problem commenced”. The Constitution has already undergone several amendments; yet, it is still bad. The problems of hunger, insecurity, corruption, mutual distrust, religious intolerance, favouritism, ethnicity, sectionalism, prebendalism, et al, mount by the day.
The beauty of democracy is the primacy of the wishes of the people and the mutability of the instrument that binds the people and the government.
THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE IS SUPREME (SALUS POPULI EST SUPREMALEX)
The people have a say as to how they want to be governed; this is the whole purpose of democracy. The donor of the power remains the people. A tail cannot wag the dog; it is the dog that wags the tail. Therefore, the government should learn to subscribe to the will of the people, not the people subscribing to the will of the government.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, once postulated that desperate diseases require desperate remedies. Nigeria now finds herself in a desperate quagmire and hence, desperate solutions are required. The only price we have to pay for our liberty is eternal vigilance, says Learned Hand. Therefore, I urge Nigerians to stand up to their rights and demand for a fresh new Constitution that emanates from the people themselves. The will of the people is supreme (salus populi suprema lex). Nothing less.
*Being a keynote address delivered by Prof Mike Ozekhome, SAN, CON, OFR, FCIArb, LL.M, Ph.D, LL.D, D.Litt, D.Sc , at the National Dialogue (Colloquium) in honour of Prof. Ben Nwabueze, SAN, CON, NNOM, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, on Monday 18th March, 2024.
[2] Butler & Ranney, 1994,
[3] Wikipedia, ‘Referendum’ <en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/will-uk-leave-eu
[5] The Rule of Law (June 22, 2016) available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rule-of-law/
[6] Michael John DeBoer, “Equality as a Fundamental Value in the Indiana Constitution” (2004) 38 Valparaiso University Law Review 489.
[7] UN, “Rule of Law and Human Rights”, available at: https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/rule-of-law-and-human-rights/
It might be true that, as Goethe stated, “Boldness has magic’. But in policy reform, boldness has limits. In short, we can confidently say that in matters of policy reform, wisdom is the principal thing. Wisdom is the capacity to penetrate the nature of things, to gain insight into the complexities of reality and not be charmed by the splendor of appearance. Wisdom pays attention to complexity and variation and proceeds from the point of view of inquiry not of conclusion. The lack of wisdom and the surfeit of boldness is a dangerous combination in policy reform.
The Tinubu administration is suffering from this inordinate combination. The government revels in taking bold policies. Its supporters and promoters regale how the president on day one acted boldly by abruptly yanking of petrol subsidy with a gleeful intonation of ‘subsidy is gone’. Today, his opponents are shouting in chorus ‘Subsidy is gone. Long live subsidy’. Today, it is reported that the government pays about N1 trillion to subsidize the same petrol whose subsidy Gladiator Tinubu boldly yanked off. His energy advisor argues that the President has the authority to pay petrol subsidy. No one reasonably argues that a president who is also the minister of petroleum lacks the authority to subsidize petrol in a presidential system of government. What wise people doubts is whether it was wise to end subsidy in the manner President Tinubu did. Tinubu’s men said boldness has magic. But wisdom always has the last laugh.
Admittedly, there is an allure about boldness in policy reform, especially in developing economies. First, it fits the narrative of neoliberal orthodoxy. According to this orthodoxy, the reason these economies are still underdeveloped is because they have shied away from the fundamentals of a market economy. Public choice theory tells us that public officials who superintend these economies are self-serving. The government is entrenched in rent-seeking. It needs an outside warrior to crash through and uproot bad policies. From this perspective of the transition from economic failure to success, the required virtue is not wisdom but boldness.
Another reason why boldness is recommended in the folklore of policy reform is the overcommitment of policy reformers to implanting in their countries institutions of market orthodoxy from other parts of the world. If there is one recipe for development, then what matters is not context but courage to implant. A leading African political economist, Thandika Mkandawire, calls it “institutional monocropping”. This breeds ‘monotasking’. Just do the same thing they have done elsewhere notwithstanding the difference of social or geopolitical contexts. So, if the work of reformers is to disregard the constraints of cultural and social differences and implant the same institutions of a market orthodoxy, what you need are bold leaders, the more reckless the better.
This advisory has been the staple of development policy for a while. The story is that good leadership of policy reform requires bold actions, actions that are based on the mythologized power of the market to correct all perfections. To make shock-therapy work, they created enemies who must be vanquished to ensure successful transplantation. Of course, that enemy in the Nigerian context will likely be the organized labor movement. Witness President Tinubu’s railing against labour leaders as politicians who want to contest political power with him in 2027. Noami Klein captured the reformer’s ghoulish mindset in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She chronicles how the Chicago Boys in Latin America and their disciples elsewhere in the world, animated by the gospel of ‘There is No Alternative’, crashed through all contexts and left disaster as economic reform.
We do not need to go far to see the spirit of hubris in reforms. Nigeria’s ‘bold’ reform in the electricity sector shows some aspect of ‘boldness has magic’ mindset. We hastily privatized when we had not set up the room for great performance. Perhaps, if we had diligently carried out requisite commercial and regulatory reforms and sequenced the transition by first building capacity in distribution and transmission, a delayed and sequenced privatization may have worked better. Less than a year after our rushed privatization, one of the investors dropped one of the distribution companies. 11 years after, about four distribution companies have become bankrupt and repossessed by financiers. The policy is obviously a failure. Privatization may not be a bad policy. But its implementation was guided more by boldness than wisdom. Wisdom is profitable in policy reform. The problem is that wisdom requires humility to pay attention to context. Sadly, humility is not one of the things they teach in policy school.
Context matters. If President Tinubu had sequenced the removal of fuel subsidy and managed a float of the currency in a manner that wisely responds to the vagaries of economic tides, we would not be in the situation we are today where efforts to shore up the naira from an avoidable freefall could lead to stag-inflation. If President Tinubu was not too gung-ho about abruptly ending the subsidy and deliberatively searched for mitigations before announcing the policy, perhaps he would not be in such a quandary where government is flipflopping on mitigation policies.
The real lesson is that we do not need to accept the logic that policy reform requires more boldness and less wisdom. We should stop looking for bold instead of wise policies. Context matters, and because they are always unintended consequences, effective policy reform requires wisdom defined by caution and incrementalism. Caution is necessary because ideology or theoretical models do not capture the realities of any economy. Effective policy leadership requires more attention to the peculiar facts of a given society at a given period. As the legendary Chinese reformer, Premier Deng Xiaoping put it, we should know truth through facts. That is pragmatism.
President Tinubu has been forced by unsavory outcomes to walk back from some of his bold policies. For all intent he has walked back from total removal of petrol subsidy and subjection of petrol pricing to full control of the market price. Recently, he announced and walked back from Expatriate Employment Levy after it drew backlash from experts and business leaders. These false steps suggest that there may be a problem of temperament at the presidential villa. It was reported that the announcement of the immediate and complete removal of petrol subsidy was not part of the official inaugural speech by the president. Somehow the president smuggled it into his address. One explanation of this oddity is that the president wanted to prove tough by announcing and pulling through a policy that devastated President Jonathan and which his predecessor ducked throughout his eight years.
Similar temperament afflicted the management of ECOWAS’s response to the military coups in Niger and Mali. The president gave a bold and scorching speech about the imperatives of democracy and announced clampdown against the militarists in power in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. He ordered that they must revert to democracy immediately. No negotiation. Without due consideration, he declared a war against these states and almost mobilized military invasion of the three countries. After military rulers in the three countries called ECOWAS’s bluff and announced their exit from ECOWAS, President Tinubu walks back and reengages diplomacy. Boldness gave way to caution and contextuality.
This is not just happenstance. It has become the signature style of the Tinubu administration. It is quick to act and slow to deliberate. It falls too easily to the seduction of boldness and courage. Many attribute this vulnerability to the challenge of legitimacy the administration suffered at the beginning. So, it wants to look good to the influential Washington-based institutions and some foreign powers, especially in the light of the bad press the president received during the presidential election petition. How best to look good than taking tough decisions that portray it as a reforming government. As always, it is about boldness, not about wisdom.
The call for caution and consideration in reform policy is more than the appeal of pragmatism. It is about wisdom. It is about acknowledging complexities and nuances and respecting facticity. In an interesting work on why grand reform plans usually fail, Yale sociologist, James Scot, in his classic book, Seeing Like a State, argues that most grand reform fail because of failure to pay attention to what he calls ‘metis’, contextual knowledge. Oftentimes, reforms fail because reformers miss out on what is obvious. The capacity to mis out what is obvious results from preoccupation with the grand and the spectacular and a tendency to be griped by ideology rather than the reality.
One can argue that the difference between the successful economies of East Asia, whether China or South Korea, is this mentality. These countries teach enduring lessons about how to reform. First, they rebuffed ‘institutional monocropping’ even as they accepted the universalism of general principles of economics. They know, as Wofgang Stolper, Nigeria’s first Director of Planning argued in 1970, that “The starting point of all policies, economic or otherwise, is a given ethnic, political, cultural, and economic situation”. It is focusing on the concrete reality of a given society at a given time that determines success in reforms. China rejected ‘shock therapy’ in its transition to a prosperous economy because its policy reformers had hardnosed focus on the realities of the Chinese soceity, not on an imaginary principles of a free market economy. The notion of ‘Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics’ reflects the wisdom of paying attention to context.
Even in the economics of innovation, what we see with successful cases of Israel, Ireland, Taiwan of even South Korea is that a national innovation system is constructed to align with peculiar factor endowments and a country’s comparative advantage in tradable goods, not based on any universal principle of innovation. Unsuccessful countries in the innovation economy parrot market-based ideas not aligned to historical realities. It is evident that leading reform is a managerial art rather than a theoretical science. Once it is about management, the central virtue is wisdom not boldness.
President Tinubu has a difficult economy to manage. President Buhari has left a legacy of gross mismanagement that would challenge the most clear-headed strategist. To have a clear chance of success, the Tinubu administration should readjust its basic ideas and temperament about reform. It is seductive to be hailed as a bold reformer. But boldness often leads to tragic oversight and imposes an illusory romance with textbook solutions.
Good policies are only good to the extent their articulation captures the real situations of society. Good policies are good because they are derivatives of accurate diagnosis and deep deliberation. It is important to focus on the concrete realities of everyday life in policy reform. There is an ongoing call for radical revision of the discipline of economics and economic policymaking. The decades of failure of development economics have foisted on economists a realization of the need for less hubris and more caution. As Harvard Dani Rodrik recently put it in IMF’s March 2024 Finance & Development Magazine, “The most pressing economic problems of our times require pragmatic remedies closely tailored to contexts”.
The chief virtue of pragmatists is wisdom drive by humility, not boldness. President Tinubu and his policy aides should disembark from this wagon of boldness. Wisdom is the principal thing.
A deeply human dimension was introduced yesterday evening into the tragedy that occurred in the Okuama community of Delta state when an elder statesman, Chief Edwin Clark, appeared on Arise News. He offered a lot of words of wisdom in the television show to help douse the tension arising from the killing of 16 soldiers.
Clark, an Ijaw leader with Urhobo blood in him, said that a few days before the killings he spoke with Lt. Col A.H. Ali and Captain D.E. Obi, two officers among the 16 soldiers who went on a peace mission following a land dispute between Okuama, an Urhobo community, and their Ijaw neighbours of Okoloba. In a notably balanced intervention, Clark reminded the two Niger Delta communities in conflict of their common ancestry and cultural overlaps. They “are the same people,” he said with the full authority of his age. He recalled that he himself attended primary school in the area 82 years ago.
Ironically, Clark’s calls to these officers were in respect of the funeral of his younger brother, Colonel Bernard Clark (retired), which took place last Friday.
In an emotion-laden tone, Clark animated things, saying repeatedly that he knew the officers as he condemned the killings while urging the military authorities to avoid collective punishment of the innocent people in the Okuama community.
Clark also called for a thorough investigation, cautioning against reaching a wrong conclusion on the criminal act. What Clark said about Lt. Col Ali and Captain Obi is a proof of the obvious fact that the issues involved are far from being abstract. The soldiers who lost their lives in the course of duty were first and foremost human beings. They were not just numbers. This elementary fact should not be forgotten in the heat of the moment. The Okuama killings constitute a sad reminder that our common humanity matters a great deal even when there are different perspectives to telling a story.
The discussion of this tragedy must, therefore, be imbued with a good sense of humanity especially in the media. The tragic story should not be told in a manner that could inflame passion. The headlines must not be disrespectful of the dead. The sensibilities of the bereaved families, friends and colleagues of the fallen heroes should be well considered in the way the bloodletting is reported.
Therefore, the circulation of bestial clips should stop. Gory pictures should not be printed. It is enough to say that the soldiers were callously killed. It is unhelpful in the situation to keep repeating the barbaric and provocative details of the killings. Perhaps, referring to what happened as a “slaughter” is even inappropriate in the circumstances. After all, one of the dictionary meanings of the noun, “slaughter,” is as follows: “the killing of animals for food.” In any case, in the mainstream journalism of the old an editor would prefer to simply publish that the soldiers were killed instead of splashing it on the front page of his newspaper that human beings were “slaughtered.” Definitely, savage photos would not be published. Sadly, the permissive nature of the social media with its huge deficit of humanity has now rendered such journalistic ethics ancient.
In the situation, the discussion of the tragedy should be sufficiently compassionate so as to avoid creating multiple tragedies in the form of what happened in Odi in Bayelsa state and Zaki Biam in Benue state. Those two communities were severely attacked by the military in reprisals following the killings of soldiers and policemen by some criminals while President Olusegun Obasanjo was in power.
It is also important that the members of the elite from the communities in dispute should be circumspect in their statements. The Urhobo and Ijaw versions of what happened are widely circulating in the various media outlets. However, caution is the word. It is advisable that credible information should be made available to the those who are officially given the task of investigating the crime. It is quite appropriate that President Bola Tinubu in his position as the Commander-in-Chief has directed that justice must be done. In a well-humanised statement personally signed by the President the point is made unequivocally: “The cowardly offenders responsible for this heinous crime will not go unpunished. This incident, once again, demonstrates the dangers faced by the servicemen and women in the line of duty. I salute their heroism, courage, and uncommon grit and patriotism.”
The President also said that the defence authorities are “already responding to this incident.”
Now, it is left to be seen if the response of the military high command would lessen the growing anxiety about what would happen next going by the promise from the defence headquarters: “The military assures that there would be measured responses and injurious consequences for the perpetrators of these dastardly acts. Nevertheless, the armed forces being a disciplined force that complies with rules of engagement, laws of armed conflict and respect for human rights, would be tempered by these provisions. We would not be led by emotion, but by the rule of law.”
So, while the investigation is on nothing should be done by any of the parties to worsen the problem.
Meanwhile, the issues brought to the fore by the tragic incident ought to be pondered upon by policymakers and the public alike.
For instance, state governments should take the resolution of conflicts among local communities in the state as a serious security matter. Maybe, the Okuama tragedy could have been averted if the conflict between the Urhobo community and its Ijaw neighbour had been amicably resolved by the Delta state government. Isn’t the land constitutionally vested in the governor in the first place?
The local government that is nearest to the situation should have also played a constructive role by preventing the dispute from degenerating into violence. After all, the local governments are involved in managing the affairs of the traditional institutions which often lay claim to ownership of of lands in some communities.
Secondly, the killers of the soldiers must have operated with sophisticated weapons as non-state actors. A number of panel reports gathering dust on the shelf are about the immense danger of proliferation of arms and ammunition. The free flow of arms is a common factor in the various shapes of insecurity bedevilling the land from the rainforest to the Sahel. A programme of massive disarmament should be a strategic priority in order to check violent crimes.
Thirdly, the police should be prepared in terms of manpower and equipment to perform its central duty in internal security. Gradually, the military should be withdrawing from policing duties so as to face its primary defence role squarely. The police are better placed, for instance, to make arrest and prosecute the killers of the soldiers.
As condolences continue to pour in for the bereaved families and the military, reflections on the Okuama tragedy should be geared towards putting the nation in a position to say never again will its soldiers be killed in such a horrific manner.
A presidential aspirant of one of the two mainstream political parties in the United States of America has just lost the nomination to his opponent in a keenly contested presidential primary. Thinking that the combination of both men would make a formidable team in the looming presidential election, the loser was asked whether, if contacted, he would accept to be running mate to the winner of the party flag. His response was terse: "I hate all vices, including the vice presidency"!
In most countries, especially in a democracy, the vice president is seen as the Number Two man; although I think this should not be so, especially where the three arms of government - the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary - are deemed equal and co-terminus according to the theory of separation of powers as propounded by Baron de Montesquieu. One arm should not be Number One and Number Two at the same time. If the Executive claims the Number One slot, then, the Legislature and Judiciary should share the Number Two and Number Three slots as the head of the other two arms of government. The vice president heads no arm of government. He becomes relevant only when the president is not available. But this is an argument for another day!
Whoever it was that likened the vice president or deputy governor to a vehicle's spare tyre is closer to the point. Spare tyres are irrelevant when the actual tyres are in active service. What is a spare? A dictionary definition says it is "an extra tyre carried in a motor vehicle for use in case of a puncture" In the event of no puncture, then, the spare tyre is of no relevance but is a burden that occupies space that could otherwise have been converted to more beneficial use. Little wonder, then, that many motor vehicles these days have devised the means of tucking the spare tyre away in compartments that would not use up space needed for more useful purposes.
Are "spare tyres" similarly of little or no use in a political setting? The answer is yes and no. In the United States, there is the saying that the vice president is to be seen and not heard. In other words, the Number Two must not hug, share or struggle for the limelight with the boss. When the mother elephant trumpets, the baby must keep quiet! Any errant baby elephant that trumpets when the mother trumpets will get a knock on the head to silence it! Like John the Baptist, the forerunner, said in the scriptures that he must decrease for Jesus Christ to increase, the vice president or deputy governor is to promote his or her boss rather than attempt, like Lucifer did with God, to set up his or her own throne and contest power with or undermine the boss.
The 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended) invests the president and governors with immense powers, such that their vice is left virtually at their mercy. They can empower them; they can also emasculate them. Even where the Constitution vests the vice president with the headship of the National Economic Council, he still can only effectively function in this office at the pleasure of the president.
This, however, is not to say that the position of vice president or deputy governor is totally irrelevant. For the purpose of contesting elections, no one can be deemed duly elected as president or governor without having a duly elected vice or deputy. Where the election of a vice or deputy is voided, the election of the president or governor stands similarly voided. I think this is what the African-American politician and civil rights activist, Rev. Jesse Jackson, means when he said a bird needs two wings to fly.
Our history is replete with strong deputies who even took the shine off the boss. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was a strong deputy to Gen. Yakubu Gowon. When Gowon, in 1974, declared 1976, the date he had earlier set for the return to civilian rule, as unrealistic and Awo left his cabinet, he was toppled on July 29, 1975 while attending an OAU meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Gen. Murtala Muhammed was a strong leader; his deputy, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, was not seen, not to talk of being heard. But when Obasanjo himself became the Head of State as a result of the assassination of Murtala on February 13, 1976, his deputy, Gen. Musa Yar'adua, was not only a very strong deputy, he was the de facto ruler while Obasanjo was a mere figurehead Head of State.
The country's first civilian president, Alhaji Shehu Shagari and his vice, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, were both captives of their party, the National Party of NIgeria (NPN). The party chairman, Meridith Adisa Akinloye, and Umaru Dikko, of the rice and cement armada fame, were, perhaps, even more powerful than Shagari and Ekwueme.
Buhari as military dictator (1983 - 1985) was not as powerful as his deputy, Tunde Idiagbon. Buhari is said characteristically to enjoy the plums of office while someone else does all the job for him. So, Idiagbon was famously regarded as Buhari's brain box in Buhari's first coming as the country's leader.
Ibrahim Babangida was his own man. He marginalized his deputy, Commodore Ebitu Ukiwu, who was forced to resign and was replaced by pliant and fawning Augustus Aikhomu. Sani Abacha, like Babangida, was his own man. Efforts by his deputy, Gen. Oladipo Diya, to wield some influence led to his being entangled in allegations of a coup plot. Diya barely escaped with his life.
Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar and his deputy, Mike Akhigbe, were birds of a feather - drab! The only eventful events of their tenure were that MKO Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections judged free and fair by all, died in their custody; they released some detained persons and also handed over power to a civilian government on May 29, 1999.
In his second coming as Nigeria's leader, Obasanjo, in his first term of office, literally ceded effective power to his deputy, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who leveraged it to feather his nest. Atiku nearly pulled the rug off Obasanjo's feet but the wily old fox fought back and had Atiku's back to the wall during his second term. Nevertheless, Atiku was a strong deputy.
Umaru Yar'Adua was a strong-willed leader but ill-health got the better part of him. Both as vice president and as president, Goodluck Jonathan was a weak leader. Jonathan and his vice, Namandi Sambo, were birds of a feather - colourless!
In Buhari's second coming as NIgeria's leader, he was an absentee president who abdicated power to a cabal of family members and friends to run the country aground while serving ethnic, religious and regional interests. Buhari's vice, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, was a passenger in the corridors of power. At best, he only improved on his curriculum vitae!
It is too early to say what kind of leader President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will make. As the governor of Lagos State, he was a strong governor who saw off two deputy governors before finishing his second term with the third. Will he make a strong president? For now, the answer blows in the wind. The confidence he found to announce that fuel subsidy is gone in his inaugural address to the nation must now be brought to bear in vital sectors of the country's national life: rampaging insecurity, runaway inflation and virtual economic collapse, the fight against corruption, and the need to call his predecessor to account for his atrocious tenure.
Tinubu's vice, Kashim Shettima, was a strong governor in Borno but is yet to carve a niche for himself as the country's Number Two. What did he bring into this government, if I may ask? What is his forte? Is it security? Is it the economy? Is it bridge-building and fire-fighting? I have not seen much of Shettima's contributions to the Tinubu presidency.
Tinubu is engulfed on many fronts. He appears to me as the only one fighting the fires. Exasperated, I think, his wife, Oluremi, joined the fray the other day in Bauchi, gallantly vowing to die fighting on the side of her husband. Where are the key members of the Tinubu administration and in which area are they lifting up Tinubu's hands, like biblical Aaron and Hur did unto Moses?
Although Tinubu has passed a vote of confidence in his Chief of Staff, all we hear from some circles are stories of scandals, more scandals and still more scandals! The office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation is powerful; a Northern Christian occupies it. Has that resulted in his ability to wall in his constituency around the president?
The greatest challenge of the country today is insecurity - which is gulping money that otherwise should have been put to productive ventures, which is destroying critical infrastructure, which is driving farmers from the farm and students/pupils from school, which is creating millions of internally-displaced persons, which daily leads to the killing and maiming of the innocent, which breeds kidnapping for ransom, etc.
Yet, the National Security Adviser is from the same North. The MInister of Defence is from the same North. The Chief of Defence Staff is from the same North. The Chief of Air Staff is from the same North. We can go on and on! What have all these people brought to the table?
Opinion is divided as to the actual role of the vice president in the Boko Haram debacle but what cannot be denied is that he has a wealth of experience when the topic of discussion is insurgency. How has he brought that experience to bear since May 29, 2023?
Is there a grand design to continually bleed this country for some people to daily smile to the bank? Is there a plot to make the country ungovernable for a southern President? A scantily-concealed scorched-earth policy to unhing this President may be afoot. Who is for and who is against needs to be unraveled.
There have been a few writeups and commentaries on the above subject lately, and it is quite amusing how an event that represents a classic case of the familiar boardroom coup, in the form of the hostile takeover of a bank from its previous owners several years ago, is now suddenly being criminalised. The acquiring parties in the transaction have been dubbed "political thieves" in one instance and projected in similar uncomplimentary epithets in several other instances.
We may not approve of it, all right, but without going into the specifics of the institution and personalities involved in the case at hand, hostile takeovers are widely accepted forms of acquiring businesses. They also do occur with something of uncommon regularity the world over, every now and then.
Hostile takeovers refer to the acquisition of targeted corporations, often against the express or tacit wishes and preferences of their existing board and management. Plus, they are perfectly legal and effectively regulated, with adequate provisions to deal with errant behaviour on either side. They are distinct from friendly takeovers, in which the two parties to the transaction mutually agree to cooperate towards the same result.
Often accomplished by stealth, a hostile takeover takes place when an acquiring entity, also described as the acquirer or aggressor, desires to attain full control of the target company by way of the surreptitious acquisition of a significant enough quantum of its shares from existing shareholders. More often than not, that is achieved without the prior knowledge, sanction, and/or cooperation of the target company's existing management and/or owners, who are subsequently bought out in the end.
It is imperative to stress at this point that the entire setting around the hostile takeover undertaking is centered around the application of the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle; between and amongst holders of the target company's stocks and potential investors desirous of acquiring same, and it is achieved through the instrumentality of the appropriate medium for the trading of the stocks.
Through such legal stock transactions, the stake of the original owners or majority shareholders gradually gets diluted as the shares exchange hands and new buyers are brought in; a process that can be accomplished within a relatively short time span or over an extended period from start to finish. Once the aggressor has acquired a reasonable enough proportion of shares to trigger a takeover, the deed is as good as done.
Of course, in all probability, the target company would view a hostile takeover as nothing short of a brazen assault or an undesirable invasion aimed at undermining the independence and effective control of its existing management team. And rightly so too. Conversely, advocates and/or supporters of hostile takeovers would argue that they help stimulate and promote impactful positive changes and improvements in the acquired entity. These can manifest in the form of improved corporate governance practices, along with enhanced operational efficiencies and increased shareholder value in the acquired entity.
Now, we may not approve of the methods employed in the case of Access Bank acquisition well over two decades ago today, for example, and that is fine. But the next logical and honest question we should all ask ourselves is whether or not the acquisition and subsequent takeover of the bank from its initial promoters has achieved the above-stated objectives.
And a dispassionate response to that question should necessarily take into consideration the current standing of the bank in the industry, vis-a-vis the state it was prior to the acquisition, while also not losing sight of the fact that many of the bank’s contemporaries established at or about the same time with it have since gone under.
It is also worthy of note that the same or similar hostile takeover practices that some of the writeups in reference actively seek to criminalise are still happening, both in the nation's financial services industry and in other critical sectors of the economy even as we speak.
Indeed, the latest of such takeovers occurred just recently when Femi Otedola effectively took over as Chair of First Bank of Nigeria (FBN) Holdings Plc in a similar fashion, by virtue of his becoming the largest shareholder of the bank through his direct and indirect holdings. Another instance, albeit a failed one, would be that of the attempted takeover of Transcorp Plc, with investments in the Hospitality, Power, and Oil & Gas Sectors, also by the same investor not long ago. This was, however, promptly resolved amicably through negotiations between the two parties, in the overall best interest of the organisation.
Other notable examples of hostile takeovers from across the world include: the acquisition of Time Warner by America Online Inc. (AOL), regarded as the biggest and one of the most aggressive takeover bids to date; InBev’s acquisition of Anheuser - Busch, maker of Budweiser in mid-2008; the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle towards the end of 2004; that of RBS and ABN Amro in October 2007; and Kraft Foods’ takeover of Cadbury, amongst several others.
Of course, there are several initiative-taking and reactive defensive strategies out there that can be employed to guard against hostile takeovers and/or respond to them, which the original promoters of Access Bank obviously failed to take advantage of at the time. but that is an entirely different discussion for another day.
Abdullahi Usman
He travels like a bird
With wings that take him far But his feathers fall everywhere And settle like a scar
When he lands he’s worshipped
A king upon a throne
But they don’t know the consequence For he doesn’t let it show
His children miss him dearly Those feathers which he dropped Heartbeat, heartbeats all over Heartbroken he is naught
A brick atop a ceiling
A drop outside a glass
We know outside he means something But when is his entrance?
...
August 3, 2019
The day we saw him last Though far across the water His freedom was still cast
Myself upon a couch
My Brother sprawled on chair
My Mother’s words reached high-pitched points Now finally aware
I imagined it with handcuffs Peaceful from respect
A man who fought for his people Not needing to object
And then I saw the truth An act of tyranny
A look into the harsh abuse
Now everyone would see ...
His laugh came with an accent
His heritage so clear
We loved the way he said his words The way he wore his hair
We poked fun at him often For things a father has
His funny, big round tummy His passion for bad dance
He gave the greatest hugs
A man with a big heart
That beat for everyone he knew — I’ve known him less apart
I hope once more I’ll see him
That his wings land him home
His crown thorns grow unbearable His window dew drops foam
[OPINION] Can Artificial Intelligence Robots Outperform Politicians and Bureaucrats in Government? - Sonny Iroche
AdminIn recent years, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has sparked a debate about the revolutionary impact of the nascent technology and the potential for these technologies to replace humans, in many areas such as politicians and bureaucrats in government. The idea of unbiased algorithms generating robots that are free from the shortcomings of incompetence and corruption associated with some of these professionals has become of particular interest to me, because of the fact that a country as blessed as Nigeria, had been brought to a near comatose state of economic depression, as a result of past incompetent and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
Now as an AI scholar and enthusiast, it is clear to some of us in that space and field of studies and research, that with AI's proven ability to perform tasks with close to zero margin of error, it begs the question: Can robotic AI perform better than politicians and bureaucrats?
Governments around the world have faced numerous cases of incompetence, social and financial scandals, and corruption among their leaders. Transparency International and other socio-political watchdogs have consistently ranked countries based on their perceived levels of corruption and governance effectiveness. From presidents and prime ministers to state governors and parliamentarians, the list of officials charged with corruption and misappropriation of public funds is extensive. Could a leader programmed with AI be the solution to this pervasive issue?
The efficiency and productivity of AI in various tasks have been well-documented. From drug discovery to the cure of diseases that have long eluded human researchers, AI has shown its capacity to outperform humans in many areas. For example, AI has consistently defeated world champions in games like chess and Go, showcasing its superiority in strategic decision-making and problem-solving capabilities.
In the case of Nigeria and the challenges that the country currently faces, have been as a result of prolonged economic crimes against the sovereignty by men and women who have been charged with the administration of the country’s resources for several decades in the past. Clear examples abound in nearly every field of the country, in critical sectors of the economy and overall development. The bureaucracy has long been fraught with endemic bribery and corruption, inefficiency and ineffectiveness in nearly all aspects of our national life- ranging from the civil service, Ports Authority Administration, Customs, Police, Immigration, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and crude oil theft, allegedly by humans who were put in charge of running and protecting the main national asset, the Central Bank of Nigeria (that became a Bureau De Change for a few), and dabbled into all manner of unrelated functions of a Central Bank, and almost all agencies of government are immersed in misappropriation of public funds and resources.
Considering these advancements in technology, the idea of using AI in governance is not far-fetched. International organizations such as the United Nations, ASEAN Union, African Union,BRICS and other regional blocs should initiate discussions on the potential applications of AI in leadership roles. By leveraging algorithms to create effective and efficient systems for both public and private sector leaders, could AI help address some of the longstanding challenges facing humanity, such as wars, conflicts, hunger, diseases, climate change, nuclear proliferation and corruption?
The use of AI in governance on the other hand, however, raises some important ethical and practical considerations. While AI may offer solutions to some of the problems plaguing governments worldwide, there are concerns about accountability, transparency, and the potential for bias in AI decision-making. How can we ensure that AI-driven leadership is fair and equitable for all members of society? What safeguards need to be put in place to prevent abuse of power by AI systems? That is the reason that every country or economic bloc, come up with a Regulatory Framework for the application of AI. The USA, China, UK, and the European Union (EU), have already led with that initiative of creating regulations around the use of AI. (In my publication: “The Need for the Creation of a Regulatory Framework for AI” published in the National Diploma Newspaper; I had called on the Federal Government of Nigeria to establish an AI regulatory framework and authority)
One potential benefit of AI in governance is its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, through Generative AI (GAI), Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Models (LLM), quickly and accurately. By processing information from various sources, AI systems can provide insights that human leaders may overlook. This data-driven approach to decision-making could lead to more informed policies and strategies, potentially improving the overall effectiveness of government operations.
Additionally, AI could help streamline bureaucratic processes and reduce inefficiencies in government agencies. By automating routine tasks and optimizing resource allocation, AI systems could free up human officials to focus on more strategic and high-level responsibilities. This could lead to a more agile and responsive government that is better equipped to address the needs of its citizens.
However, the integration of AI into governance is not without its challenges. One major concern is the potential for AI systems to perpetuate existing biases and discrimination. If AI algorithms are trained on data that reflects historical inequalities, they may inadvertently reinforce these biases in their decision-making processes. To prevent this, it is essential to develop AI systems that are transparent, accountable, and regularly audited for fairness.
Another challenge is the risk of AI systems being manipulated or hacked to serve malicious purposes, such as rigging elections, and population head counts in national census. Ensuring the security and integrity of AI systems in governance will be crucial to preventing unauthorized access and manipulation of sensitive government data. Strong cybersecurity measures and robust oversight mechanisms will be necessary to safeguard AI-driven governance systems from external threats.
There is also this notion that the implementation of AI would lead to job losses. The answer is Yes and No. For the proponents of job losses; they are right to the extent of the types and manning of jobs. And for those who say No, that AI would not lead to job losses par say, they argue that in enhancing productivity and efficiency, it would create greater opportunities in the economic value chain, that would need workers to retrain in new fields that would be needed as a result of AI applications to business.
In conclusion, the debate over whether robotic AI can outperform human politicians and bureaucrats is complex and multifaceted. While AI has demonstrated impressive capabilities in various domains, the integration of AI into governance poses unique challenges and considerations. By engaging in thoughtful discussions and collaboration, national, international organizations and governments can explore the potential benefits of AI in leadership roles while addressing the ethical and practical concerns associated with this technology. The future of AI in governance is uncertain, but with careful planning and strategic implementation, it has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach governance and decision-making on a global scale. For me, it is clear that the benefits of an AI-fuel governance system, far outweighs its perceived drawbacks.
Sonny Iroche: A 2022/2023 Senior Academic Visitor at the African Studies Centre of the University of Oxford.
Now a 2024 Post Graduate Student in “Artificial Intelligence for Business” at the Saïd Business School. University of Oxford
Many Nigerians believe that restructuring the country or devolving powers from the centre to the sub-nationals is the silver bullet that will solve all our problems. This belief has sustained the debate for or against restructuring for decades. As fanciful as this claim is, I disagree with this position because bad leadership is a more significant challenge than the superstructure of the country. Although the way Nigeria is structured does not make for optimal productivity and needs some form of amendment or tinkering, we need thinking and honest leadership to make progress. This kind of leadership is required at the central and sub-national levels.
One area in which sub-nationals or states of the federation would take advantage of to show that a restructured Nigeria can be an oasis of development is electricity generation, transmission, and distribution. This is because of the multiplier effect of electricity on quality of life, productivity, employment generation, and human development. The recent epidemic of blackouts that has enveloped the nation due to the collapse of the national grid and frequent power outages have challenged the proposition that if power is devolved to the sub-nationals or states, most, if not all, of our problems would be solved. It has also brought to the fore the need for state governments to step up their game. A quick review of how a change in the 1999 constitutional provision and a new electricity act has necessitated a change in the role of state governments in electric power sufficiency is essential for clarity.
Electricity has always been on the concurrent legislative list. It was so under the 1963 and 1979 constitutions. However, the 1999 provisions on the concurrent federal and state legislative powers over electricity were drafted in a way that made it impossible for states to make laws to establish their electricity markets and play a pivotal role in addressing power shortages that have literarily crippled our economic growth. Eventually, in 2023, the National and State assemblies came together to amend the 1999 constitution and remove the constraints that challenged enacting state laws on electricity. This was followed up by enacting a new Electricity Act, 2023, which allowed states to regulate electricity generation, transmission, and distribution businesses within their territories. The act created two electricity markets, the national and state markets. The National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) from Abuja will regulate the national electricity market, while the states are expected to implement electricity market policies, legal frameworks, and institutions to regulate their respective state electricity markets.
One takeaway from the current state of the anaemic electricity supply nationwide is that states cannot continue to wait for the federal government alone to resolve the challenge. The states now have the full constitutional authority to create the frameworks for the adequate electricity supply to their citizens. They now have the power to create the right environment to attract investment into this new electricity market and ultimately raise the national power-generating capacity from the embarrassing levels at which it is currently. The current situation where the country generates less than 4,000 MW of electricity for 220 million people, but the same people own and operate over 50,000 MW of self-generation or generator capacity, makes us appear unserious. Despite this 50,000mw self-generation, we still have epileptic power nationally, producing sub-optimally and far less than our potential. The epidemic of blackouts that has enveloped the nation in the past few weeks has challenged the proposition that if power is devolved to the sub-nationals or states, most, if not all, our problems would be solved.
I will share my thoughts on why most state governments are not taking advantage of the new Electricity Act and should double their effort to get us out of this perennial descent into a permanent state of darkness. This is against the background of the abundance of gas in south-south and southeast states, massive potential for hydro in Southwest states and solar generation in the northern states. The significant reasons states fail to tackle the electricity problem and unleash economic growth in their states are fourfold: first, a lack of understanding of the need for and political will to fix the power problem from a state perspective. State governors prefer short-term infrastructure projects that give them political mileage and are transactional. The myth that electricity is the centre’s problem has shaped state leaders’ thinking for too long. The second is the lack of qualified and competent human resources to drive policy and serve as regulators. Even the national regulator, NERC, had this problem in 2006 when they started, which is still so today. The third is the problem of implementation and enforcement of policies, laws, and agreements in the long term. Most investors have had to contend with violations of the sanctity of contracts and policy inconsistencies at the state and federal levels. The fourth reason is that states need more investment in technology and network infrastructure for electrification projects and for the ecosystem to become attractive to potential investors.
Despite these challenges, there is some silver linings in this dark cloud. Recently, I had a long engagement with the governor of Enugu state around power. Enugu state has taken the bull by the horns and has not only enacted its state policy and law but has already set up its regulatory body comprising experienced hands who have experience working in NERC, discos, or industry consulting firms. The Enugu Electricity Regulatory Commission is now on the verge of issuing its first licenses to private investors. There is no doubt that Enugu is on the path to energy self-sufficiency, which will, in turn, unleash her economic growth potential. States like Lagos, Oyo and Ogun, Kaduna, Kano, Anambra, Abia, Rivers, Taraba, and Plateau, where there is a significant advantage in terms of availability of commercial/industrial markets and availability of fuel sources such as natural gas, hydro and solar have no reason to be slow about following in Enugu state’s footsteps.
The inference from the preceding is that both political devolution and electricity devolution require political will and an enabling economic environment. An economically unviable state will remain a nightmare as it cannot demand or pay for electricity. Industrial and commercial markets for power are a prerequisite for investment in the power sector. Investors will only come if the electricity market exists. In this regard, only 30% of our states can attract investors to the power sector. Nigeria has long struggled with electricity supply issues, leading to frequent blackouts nationwide. Several factors contribute to the current blackouts and power outages, the most reoccurring narratives being grid disruptions, failing distribution infrastructure and, topmost, short supply of gas due to debt and other commercial reasons.
Therefore, the federal government still has a crucial role in the power sector to drive social and economic development on a national scale. It must create the right ecosystem to spur investment in electricity infrastructure, including building new power plants, upgrading existing ones, and expanding the transmission and distribution networks. This requires both public and private sector involvement, as well as partnerships with international organizations and investors. It must champion the diversification of energy sources, especially renewable energy, such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, which provide a more sustainable and reliable electricity supply.
The current state of the anaemic electricity supply in Nigeria, as experienced in the blackouts of the past few weeks, calls for a new approach. Nigeria’s blackout problem is not just a technical issue but a combination of human capacity challenges and systemic inefficiencies requiring urgent and comprehensive solutions. The flickering lights of Nigeria are a stark reminder of the urgent need for visionary leadership at the federal and state levels in the energy sector. We must never forget that blackouts are not just inconvenient interruptions; they’re crippling barriers to progress and development.
The current national blackout should be a wake-up call for states of the federation to wake up from their complacency and speed up the process of playing a pivotal role in energy sufficiency. State governments must avail themselves of the incredible opportunity the new Electricity Act provided them and at least provide the building blocks to electricity sufficiency and efficiency in the states.
“Nigeria, long known for its flamboyant corruption”, was how the journal, ‘The Historian’, synopsized an article on Nigeria by Steven Pierce five years ago. Because character is smoke, scandals of same hues and similar odour have continued to climb the ladder of time with us. Indeed, the narratives in the cement scandal of fifty years ago would sound so familiar to Nigerians of this day. You remember the oil subsidy scandal and its sad, lurid details. Under the military in 1974/1975, people demanded and got paid demurrage for goods that never existed. In this democracy, people have collected (and may still be collecting) subsidy payments for vessels of petrol that never came here or that never existed”.
On October 29, 1974, the Nigerian Ministry of Defence, through the Ministry of External Affairs, wrote to Nigerian missions and embassies abroad that it wanted to buy tonnes of cement to build barracks for its post-civil war armed forces of 200,000 officers and men. The Nigerian Army had just about 8,000 personnel before the war. The ministry not only made that open call for supply of cement, it avoided competitive bidding; it fixed the price at $60/per ton. Analysts noted that that offer price was five dollars more than the prevailing world market price. But, no wahala. Price and pricing have never been a problem for Nigeria. In fact, at that point in our growth (or decadence), the problem we had wasn’t money, it was what to spend it on.
So, between December 1974 and June 1975, our Ministry of Defence, which needed just 6 (six) million metric tonnes of cement, awarded 69 contracts for 16.23 million metric tonnes valued at almost $1billion. Other agencies and departments of government soon got on board the cement armada. History says half of the world’s cement was diverted to Nigeria. One researcher (Fabian Ihekweme, 2000) found that “approximately half the merchant ships in the world which were suitable for carrying cement became involved in supplying Nigeria.” An American newspaper reported that “the massive orders led to an armada of ships anchored off the Lagos coastline…stretching as far as the eye could see. Many were decrepit hulks manned by skeleton crews dispatched by ship owners to collect demurrage costs…”
The end was the famous cement scandal of 1974/75 which The New York Times of June 28, 1976 described as “a web of kickbacks and bribes involving government officials, foreign ship owners, corrupt purchasing agents, unscrupulous middlemen, phony corporations, dubious letters of credit and Swiss bank accounts.”
The scandal was not just about us biting more than our mouths could contain. We not only allowed and accepted substandard cement from suppliers, concessions were granted by Nigeria approving extension of expiry dates for expired products. Hanaan Marwah, an African infrastructure historian formerly with the London School of Economics, did a major work on this in 2020 for Business History. She places the scandal “in the context of debates about corruption, organizational failure and a ‘resource curse’ in Nigeria.” We had a ports congestion of over 400 ships queuing to offload cement. To compensate for the delay at the ports, we offered generous demurrage. We increased payable demurrage from the standard $3,500 per day to $4,100/ per ship per day. Some ships came carrying nothing; some did not come near our ports at all; some never existed. Yet they all claimed demurrage. And we paid. An account says Nigeria ultimately paid an estimated $240 million in real and phony demurrage costs.
In instances when deals were too criminally stark to click, Nigeria demurred in payment of costs for delays. And some audacious fake suppliers went to court to demand payment for their ashy goods. For this, Nigeria had a harvest of court cases, home and abroad. The very interesting UK Supreme Court appeal case number (1978) EWCA Civ J1219-3 appeals to me here. That case was between a company, Etablissement Esefka International Anstalt (Plaintiffs/Respondents) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (Defendants/Appellants).
Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, who presided over the appeal, tells the story of the case better in elegance of language and in ghastly details – and copiously I am quoting him:
“This is another case involving what has been called in the papers ‘the cement scandal’ in regard to Nigeria. It so happened a few years ago that the Ministry of Defence in Nigeria ordered vast quantities of cement from all over the world. The Central Bank of Nigeria issued letters of credit to pay for all the cement which was coming in, and a good deal of it was payable through London banks.
“Great quantities of cement were shipped to Lagos: and at one time there were 300 or 400 ships waiting outside the port of Lagos to discharge the cement. There were not enough wharves or quays to take it there, let alone all the other goods coming into Nigeria. So immense demurrage was built up on the ships which were lying outside the port of Lagos for months and months. The story of what happened will be found in the case of Trendtrex v. The Central Bank of Nigeria, in which that bank claimed sovereign immunity and said they could not be sued. It was held in this court that they could be sued in the ordinary courts. That was the position in law. This is a further aspect of that “cement scandal”.
“In this case the Ministry of Defence ordered 240,000 metric tons of cement in December 1974 at a price of U.S.$59.90 per metric ton c.i.f. Lagos. The total purchase price was U.S.$14,376,000. That was ordered and agreed to be paid for by the Ministry of Defence in Lagos from a company (I will call it such) called Etablissement Esefka International Anstalt of Liechtenstein, but operating apparently from an address in the Strand, London. The Nigerian Ministry of Defence said that letters of credit would be opened accordingly – transferable, divisible letters of credit. The letters of credit were issued on the 18th March, 1975. The advice was given by the Midland Bank here on the account of the Central Bank of Nigeria for these monies to be paid for the goods against documents. The documents included commercial invoices (four copies), a full set of four bills of lading, an insurance policy and the like. The ordinary set of shipping documents was to come forward. The credit was irrevocable, transferable and divisible: and, furthermore, there was a special provision by annexure for demurrage to be payable in the total sum of U.S.$4,100 a day. That demurrage also came under the letters of credit which were issued by the Central Bank of Nigeria through the London correspondents the Midland Bank in favour of the Liechtenstein company Esefka International.
“I do not suppose that Esefka International had any cement at all themselves. They had to buy it; and apparently successfully in several cases. A good deal of the cement was shipped, a good many of the ships were held up, and a good deal of demurrage was payable. As to a great number of them, no question arises. But a question does arise in regard to eight vessels which were supposed to have shipped about 94,000 tons of this cement. With regard to those eight vessels, the shipping documents, the bills of lading, certificates and the like were presented to the Midland Bank as though everything was in good order. On being presented with those documents, the Midland Bank in London paid out huge sums in respect of these goods. Nearly $6,000,000 were paid out in respect of these ships.
“Lo and behold. I will come almost to the end of the story in a moment. Solicitors from London have been out to Lagos on behalf of the Central Bank of Nigeria. They have been to Greece, and they have obtained very strong evidence that there were no genuine documents at all – that these bills of lading were not genuine, but were forged. There is great doubt whether these eight vessels ever existed at all. What happened was that bills of lading were presented on behalf of three of these vessels by Esefka in Liechtenstein, and five others by a gentleman called Klemo. This is the way they got the money. Mr. Klemo, for example, on the 21st June, 1975 presented to the bank in London four commercial invoices apparently in order, full sets of 4/4 shipped bills of lading apparently in order, giving the name of the ship ex so and so. For instance, I have one before me for the m.t. Lion ex Avgi.In practically every one of these eight ships the bills of lading appeared as if there had been a ship which had changed its name. Nearly all the bills of lading were made out on that basis, and signed by the master, that they were shipped at a port in Greece called Volos.
“When the solicitor from London went out to Greece he found that it was all “moonshine” in effect.They had never had any of these ships in Volos at all. And Volos had not got the quantity of cement or anything like it to fulfil these supposed bills of lading. What is more, the harbourmaster did not know of any being put on board or sent forward, and so forth. So a very strong case was made out that these bills of lading were not genuine at all. They were forged in respect of goods which had never existed.
“In addition, added to these documents, there was a certificate of value given by Mr. Paul Harris, who seems to be a leading member of this Liechtenstein company Esefka International. He apparently lives in Zurich now. He gave certificates of value and certificates of origin of these goods, certifying himself that the invoices were all correct and the goods were produced in Greece and so on. When he was asked for an explanation of it, he said that he signed it in blank thinking that it would be all right in the ordinary way. That sounds a little suspicious to me: people ought not to sign certificates of this kind in blank and leave them for other people to fill in. At all events, there it was.
“Esefka, the Liechtenstein company, got money on three vessels. There is a question of whether those vessels ever existed. Klemo got money on five other vessels, and the same question mark arises about those. And the long and the short of it is that on these supposedly genuine documents Mr. Klemo and the other people got U.S.$6,000,000.
“When the solicitor from London found this out, he advised the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Midland Bank in London that they were not to pay any more money. They were certainly not to pay any demurrage with regard to this claim under these letters of credit when this kind of fraud, as he said it was, had been perpetrated.
“Was there such a fraud or not? Of course it is a debatable question. We have not got anywhere near the trial itself. But for myself, in view of the strength of the evidence which has been collected by the London solicitor in Lagos and in Greece, it seems to be elementary that, if it was a genuine transaction, Mr. Paul Harris (who was obviously the genius behind it) and Mr. Klemo (who was the person who was supposed to have supplied the goods) would have made affidavits or come forward to show that these were genuine goods and these were genuine shipments.
“But there are no such affidavits. All we know about Mr. Klemo is that he supposedly in May 1975 took up a divisible part of 60,000 tons of this supply and took up the transfer of the corresponding letters of credit. There it is…”
That was about us from the legendary Lord Denning.
The Shagari regime of 1979 to 1983 had its “Rice Armada” scandal into which Nigeria reportedly sank over N4 billion. A dollar exchanged for 55 kobo in 1980 when we minted that scandal. The scandal is foregrounded by a story of food crisis in Nigeria. The price of rice tripled with consequent political and social implications. President Shehu Shagari responded with mass issuance of import licences for 200,000 metric tonnes of rice in January 1980. A big scandal soon afflicted the policy. Stories of how sweet sleaze was being extracted from people’s hunger painted the street red. As more and more rice reportedly came in, the price of the commodity was going up, aiming at the roof. Who and who got the licences? Jon Kraus answers that question in his ‘Nigeria under Shagari’ (1982) published in Current History, Volume 81. Kraus writes that when the scandal broke, and the National Assembly demanded a list of the licencees, what it found on the list of rice importers were “records and electronics companies.”
Further to the lawmakers’ horror, on the list were names of their leaders in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. The Washington Post of 26 December, 1980 reported that one of the rice merchants, the deputy leader of the House of Representatives, was very “unapologetic about his floor-tile company receiving one of the highly sought after licenses.” To reporters who questioned him, The Washington Post said the House leader posed a counter question: “Do you think because I am in the House of Representatives I should stop doing business? I have been in business a long time.”
The arrogance in the above statement shocked Nigeria of 1980. If you followed proceedings in our senate in the last seven days, you would know that such audacity of privilege won’t shock anyone in Nigeria of today. Bola Tinubu’s presidency calmly admitted last week that he presented a budget of N27.5 trillion to the National Assembly but the “National Assembly, in its wisdom, increased the amount proposed by the executive by N1.2 trillion.” The lawmakers returned to Tinubu a pregnant budget of N28.7 trillion, largely of borrowed money, for him to sign. And he signed it; no query raised or question asked; no explanation or answer given. Part of that infusion is the provision of scandals that will sink one borehole for N193 million.
All around us here we see what the French call déjà vu – the feeling that you’ve experienced something before. Unlike the French who thought it a mere feeling, here, the experience is real. President Shehu Shagari, in his autobiography ‘Beckoned to Serve’ wrote on what he called “the greed culture” which dominated the legislative life of his regime. He reminisced that “in the 1981 financial year alone, the three million naira that I proposed for improvements to legislators’ quarters was hiked to twenty million naira by the joint committee on finance and appropriation” (see page 269-270). Now, do the calculation. How much would that criminal hike in cost be today? A dollar exchanged for 60 kobo in 1981.
“Nigeria, long known for its flamboyant corruption”, was how the journal, ‘The Historian’, synopsized an article on Nigeria by Steven Pierce five years ago. Because character is smoke, scandals of same hues and similar odour have continued to climb the ladder of time with us. Indeed, the narratives in the cement scandal of fifty years ago would sound so familiar to Nigerians of this day. You remember the oil subsidy scandal and its sad, lurid details. Under the military in 1974/1975, people demanded and got paid demurrage for goods that never existed. In this democracy, people have collected (and may still be collecting) subsidy payments for vessels of petrol that never came here or that never existed.
Our elders say the fear of death does not prevent soldiers from going to war. Tinubu’s friends should tell him to learn to say no to his National Assembly. His success is in saying not yes to whatever is wrong. Great leaders step on toes. I read an article in the Financial Times last year on why saying no may be a virtue. On the very top of that article the author planted a quote: “You can only achieve great things if you know how to say no.” The president presumably saw everything in that budget of transparent sleaze and scandal yet he did not withhold his assent. Tinubu’s office said the big boss closed his eyes to whatever was added to what he presented “in the spirit of democracy which allows give and take.” Yet, last Friday, the president waxed patriotic. He told his visiting party patricians: “As we are fighting corruption, smugglers and old subsidy beneficiaries, they most certainly will fight back. All those who falsified records and became losers with the subsidy removal, they will fight back. But we will defend our people. The treasury belongs to the people, and that sacred trust must not be abused.”
It was so nice hearing the president pronounce “the treasury belongs to the people.” But some carnivores plan to sink 427 boreholes with N82.5 billion public funds and the president endorsed it with his signature. What else is the meaning of complicity?
More...
JONATHAN Ihonde. I never came across a leader so dominant, but invisible. So influential, but unknown. Silent waters, running deep, he was like a wall gecko in the Nigerian house, observing everything, but remaining virtually unnoticed.
Traversing the country’s political terrain since the 1960s, a major labour leader for over five decades, accepted leader of the Left forces and one of the most creative minds who ran a drama series from 1962. Yet, if a vox pop were to be held, most Nigerians would ask: Jonathan who?
Many Nigerians know Raymond Dokpesi as the founder of African Independent Television, AIT, and Ray Power, but only a handful would know that he started out as an actor under the tutelage of Ihonde, or that famous actors, like Sam Loco Efe, passed through his hands.
In trying to trace Ihonde through the flow of life, I first located him in an incident in 1961. He was suspended without pay as an accounts clerk on the fourth floor of the Western Nigeria Development Corporation, WNDC, when a communist book, Lenin in Britain was found on his desk by the Chief External Accounting Auditor, a Whiteman.
The following year, Ihonde at 23, created a satirical drama series, “Hotel De Jordan”. This came to define him. He said of the series which became one of the most popular and longest-running television drama series in the country: “The theme of ‘Hotel De Jordan’ is class antagonism; the perpetual struggle between the rich and the poor, especially in a bourgeois society … Many characters are created in the programme; revolutionary characters and reactionary characters.”
Patrick Obayagbon, a logophile who loves high-sounding words and language, must have been a student of Professor Milo Moro, one of Ihonde’s fictional characters.
Hotel De Jordan was staged across theatres in Ibadan and Benin, and the studios of NTA “highlighting the ills and foibles of the society, and with a view to solving them”. It was one of the precursors of Nollywood.
In 1963, he joined left elements in the country to establish the Society for Progress, SOFOPRO. It was led by high school teacher, Olu Adebayo, who, one day, disappeared and was never seen again. Ihonde said this group directly or and indirectly, influenced the Socialist Movement in the country.
In 1968, Ihonde was thrown into the Oko Prison by Colonel Samuel Ogbemudia, the Military Governor of then Mid-West, later renamed Bendel State. They were friends, but Ihonde who was the leader of the over 17,000 workers of the Urhonigbe Rubber Estate, Ughelli Glass Factory and Ewohimi Oil Palm Plantation, opposed the privatisation of viable and profitable public companies.
Reminiscing on this, he said: “Foreigners came from abroad to buy from these companies in hard currency. With these benefits, somebody just rose up and said he was going to sell these companies to private individuals. I then told my friend that was not possible. I resisted it.”
Ihonde had written an anti-Apartheid play: “Our blindness”. So when he was detained for organising the workers strike, Apartheid South Africa mocked Nigeria as being a worse country for detaining Ihonde whose crime was fighting for social justice.
After a long stay in prison, he was released but was further punished by being demoted from Grade Level 12 to Grade Level 4: “They -the military regime – insisted that they were going to make me an example for fighting against the government.”
When 20 years later, the Babangida regime’s privatisation policy became like full blown AIDS, the post-Chiroma Trade Union Movement embraced it. Perhaps, if the labour leaders had fought privatisation like Ihonde did, the country would have been in a far healthier state.
When the four trade union centres: the United Labour Congress, ULC; the Nigeria Trade Union Congress, NTUC; the Nigeria Workers Council, NWC; and the Labour Unity Front, LUF, merged in December 1975 to established the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Ihonde emerged one of its leaders.
However, the military regime under General Murtala Mohammed dissolved that NLC. After a new NLC was born in 1978, Ihonde became the Chairman of its Bendel State Council, comprising Edo and Delta states.
He became the ideological arrowhead of the NLC. When then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Nigeria in 1978, Ihonde came to Lagos from Benin to lead the massive demonstrations against her for supporting the Apartheid regime in South Africa. I recall that loads of armed security men were deployed at Ojuelegba to block the buses of the protesters and stop them from getting to the airport. Rather than put up resistance, Ihonde ordered the demonstrators to disembark and walk the two-three hours distance to the airport. Having lost control, the security services caught up with Ihonde on Ikorodu Road and begged him to order the demonstrators back into the buses. He simply ignored them and led the protesters to the airport. There, the Union Jack was burnt as Thatcher’s bewildered convoy was forced to sneak its way through the angry crowds.
The 1988 NLC conference was endangered by the Babangida regime that had hired fifth columnists to cause mayhem and forcibly break up the Congress. The NLC wisely turned to Ihonde in Benin, to host the conference. He did so successfully, although an angry Babangida later issued a decree to ban the Congress.
It is a measure of Ihonde’s political stature that when Chief Moshood Kashimawo Abiola sought the support of Edo State people to actualise his presidential mandate, it was to Ihonde he was directed.
Indeed, there was hardly any progressive tendency that emerged in Edo State in the last four decades, without Ihonde’s imprint. There was ecstasy in 2008 when former NLC President, Adams Oshiomhole, was elected Edo State Governor. In the euphoria, Ihonde studied Oshiomhole’s moves and told comrades that they were free to join the administration, but he would not because Oshiomhole merely signalled left but is taking a right turn.
On January 22 and 23, 2024, when a group of us organised the Lenin Centenary Conference in Abuja, Ihonde sent a paper and participated virtually. On March 8, 2024, I got a message that he was hospitalised. I spoke with him. He was recovering fast and we agreed to speak on his discharge. He was billed for discharge on Wednesday, March 13. However, the night before, he developed complications and at 9.50 am, Comrade Jonathan Ihonde marched on to assume other commands.
As the guns boomed at 7 am on March 14, in Oke-Ora to announce his interment, it was a red salute from us his political children.
On February 27, 2024, Nigeria’s National Judicial Institute (NJI) in Abuja opened a continuing education course for judges. The opening featured an address by the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Olukayode Ariwoola, who invited the participants to eschew “unethical conduct that could expose the judiciary to ridicule”. Beneath his text, it seemed as if the Chief Justice desired to warn the participants to stay away from interfering with a brief that he had chosen to make entirely his own. Under his watch, judicial appointments in Nigeria have become corruptly farcical.
The fortnight before this address, it emerged that the CJN’s daughter-in-law, Oluwakemi, was at the top of a list of 12 nominees to fill judicial vacancies in the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). In the preceding six months, he had also appointed his son, Kayode Jr., as a judge of the Federal High Court; elevated his nephew, Lateef, to become a Justice of the Court of Appeal; and made his blood brother, Adebayo, the auditor of the National Judicial Council (NJC), which he chairs in his capacity as the CJN. With this CJN’s retirement from office due on August 22, 2024, the concerted effort to anoint his daughter-in-law to the bench would presumably showcase his credentials for gender equity within his family. Let’s not digress though.
That these appointments occurred when they did is no coincidence. They are spoils of office for the CJN. Nor is it any coincidence that the same list that proposes the CJN’s daughter-in-law for appointment as a judge of the High Court of the FCT also contains the names of the daughters of the Chief Judge of the FCT, Hussaini Baba-Yusuf; and of Ariwoola’s predecessor in the office of the CJN, Ibrahim Muhammad Tanko.
As a federal institution, however, section 14(3) of Nigeria’s constitution requires that appointments to the High Court of the FCT “shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few State or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that Government or any of its agencies.” If these nominations in favour of the children of the Chief Judge of the FCT and the CJN were to be implemented, then their respective states, Kogi and Oyo, would have three judges on the bench of the court while a state like Ebonyi would have none.
It requires no original insight to understand that this kind of outcome is hardly compatible with the requirements of Federal Character. Sadly, the senior judges who are supposed to protect this high constitutional value are the people willfully endangering it.
Last month, Azubuike Oko, a lawyer from Ebonyi State, sued accusing the CJN and the Chief Judge of the FCT High Court of unconscionable insider dealing in judicial appointments. In response to the suit, the CJN and his satrap in the FCT High Court did not bother to confront the serious allegations levelled against them. Instead, they sought to disqualify Mr. Oko from litigating the issue by arguing that he lacked the standing to sue, claiming, contrary to a long line of relevant jurisprudence, that he had not suffered any personal injury.
On 15 March, the Federal High Court in Abuja presided over by Inyang Ekwo, upheld these shameful objections by the CJN and the Chief Judge of the FCT High Court. According to the judge, to establish standing to question this high racketeering in judicial office by the two officials responsible for stopping it, Mr Oko needed to show “how the appointment being considered by the defendants has affected him as a person…. This, he would have done, by showing that he applied to be considered by the defendants for appointment but he was ‘routinely excluded and marginalized.” How he was supposed to do this in a situation in which the CJN and the heads of courts who work under him will not allow a fair and credible process of judicial recruitment, only the judge can tell.
This is the latest in a line of cases in which senior judges use their offices to steal judicial appointments for their children or mistresses and then use lower court judges to make it legal. In 2020, the Justice Reform Project (JRP), an entity comprising several Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), sued to restrain former President, Muhammadu Buhari, from going forward with the appointment of 21 persons to the bench of the High Court of the FCT who, according to the JRP, “failed to meet the mandatory requirements under the NJC Procedural Rules.” That round of hires, like the latest, was a bounty for judicial insiders. On September 30, 2020, Okon Abang, then a judge of the Federal High Court, ruled that the “JRP lacked the legal right to challenge the NJC’s actions and that the National Industrial Court and not the Federal High Court was the proper court to approach as it was an employment-related case”.
The appeal by the JRP against this judgment has been pending since November 24, 2020. Meanwhile, for his efforts, Okon Abang got elevated to the Court of Appeal in October 2023 along with the nephew of the Chief Justice.
The JRP are not the only SANs openly scandalised by what the CJN and his colleagues are doing with judicial appointments. In January 2024, seven SANS from Kogi State sued the State Chief Judge, Josiah Majebi, and the Kogi State Judicial Service Commission, alleging egregious perversions in the nominations into high court vacancies in the state, including the nomination of a wife of the then outgoing governor of the state, Amina, whose only claim to the nomination appeared to be her marital relationship with the then incumbent in the office of the Governor. The SANs effectively claimed that the effort by the Chief Judge of Kogi state and the Judicial Service which he chairs, to nominate Amina Bello as a judge of the Kogi High Court was meant as a parting gift to the state governor, who was term-limited, making it clear that this was not a lawful or relevant factor in the exercise of powers of judicial appointment.
While this case is pending, the NJC has suspended the process of appointment of new judges in Kogi State. In neighbouring Edo State, however, the appointment of new judges is suspended by the ego of Governor Godwin Obaseki. In June 2023, the NJC approved the appointment of eight new judges to the High Court of Edo state. Over eight months later, the governor has refused to consent to their appointment or to swear them in. Adaze Emwanta, a former commissioner in Governor Obaseki’s cabinet, sued late last year seeking to compel the governor to formalise these appointments.
A manifestly unwilling Governor Obaseki has chosen instead to use the case as his excuse for refusing to appoint them. While the case pends, these judicial nominees waste. Because they have been nominated as judges, they can no longer undertake legal work to subsist or earn. But because they have not yet been formally appointed as judges, they cannot be paid in that role. In effect, Governor Obaseki does more than merely choose not to appoint them as judges. He has chosen to destitute them and ruin their lives.
While all these scandals unfold, the leadership of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), under the presidency of Yakubu Maikyau, SAN, has chosen to the path of eloquent silence. The president of the NBA is a member of the National Judicial Council and he is entitled to nominate three other representatives of the association into that body. For the record, the stated motto of the NBA supposedly is “promoting the rule of law”.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
Although the appointment of Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede as the Board Chairman of Access Holdings last week was a highly anticipated event, the announcement still came with elements of surprise and psychology. With the tragic death of Dr. Herbert Wigwe in February, it was clear to well-informed analysts that his friend and partner, Aigboje, would have to step in to fill the void. ‘’I am not surprised at the appointment. From the perspectives of the sudden and painful death of Herbert, it was clear that the institution would require a leader of immense status and credibility to step in and provide a strong leadership to the institution which has grown rapidly in the last two decades; and with all due respects to all the other professionals in the company, Aigboje has the requisite calibre, influence and institutional memory to play that role’’, says Dr. Henry Essien Nelson, a financial consultant, and former executive director of Eco Bank Plc.
He added, ‘’Don’t forget, it is possible that some important shareholders and analysts might have been unnerved by Herbert’s death and were worried about the direction the bank might take; and so, by Aigboje coming out of retirement to take up the leadership of the institution, some frayed nerves have been calmed’’. A statement from Access Holdings that announced the appointment described Aigboje as a visionary and accomplished leader who ‘’is bringing an outstanding record of accomplishments, wealth of expertise and leadership to guide the group to a new era of success’’. Foreign financial analysts, international partners and the regulatory authorities have also welcomed the selection, not the least because the bank is a systemically significant player in the industry.
The appointment also offers a psychological balm, some sort of solace to the 28,000 employees of the Access Nation (as they sometimes call themselves) who have been severely hurt by the tragedy. Aigboje had led the bank as chief executive from 2002 when he and Herbert acquired it, and together they built it into one of the five biggest banks by the time he retired in 2013. Herbert took over and continued in the same trajectory, taking it to the top spot in the country by assets and expanding to many African countries and other parts of the world.
When the tragedy struck, Aigboje rose to the challenge admirably well, managing every aspect admirably well. From the night of Friday, February 9 (Los Angeles time) when the chopper came down to Saturday March 9 (Nigerian time) when Herbert, his wife and son were buried in his village, Aigboje served as the chief mourner and key planner of the funeral events. ‘’It is quite consoling and uplifting to see Aig come back. He’s been and will continue to be an important part of Access Family’’, says a senior management official who declined to be mentioned in this article.
Many had however expected that Aigboje would return as the Group Chief Executive, the exact same position Herbert held. That was out of the question. As he told this writer in his office in Lagos last week, he would no longer be leading a management team of any of his businesses. ‘’I am no longer interested in being owner-manager. I prefer to spend my time now in philanthropy, sit back and play advisory roles to guide the men and women I have mentored over the years’’, he said. Those who expect that his new role will force him to shed his low-key lifestyle will also be disappointed. He will continue to stay away from the limelight and the headlines and operate from the background.
One of Aigboje’s role models is John Davison Rockefeller Sr; the late American business magnate and philanthropist. Just like the American, Aigboje has built substantial wealth in many areas, including financial services and oil exploration. Following his retirement from banking in December 2013, Aigboje was inspired by the Rockefeller Family Office to establish the Tengen Family Office as a platform to achieve his shared goal (along with Herbert Wigwe) of a multi-generational legacy of wealth transfer and business succession. The Family Office is responsible for managing the wealth of the Aig-Imoukhuede and Wigwe families.
In retirement, he focuses his attention and resources on philanthropy. Through the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, he and his wife, Ofovwe, a development specialist, oversee their $100 million philanthropic commitments in building Nigeria’s next generation of government leaders, transforming public sector effectiveness, and improving access to quality primary health care. Aigboje believes that the capacity of the public sector workforce is a key determinant of a nation’s success, therefore the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation aims to build the capacity of junior, middle and senior level African public servants. The foundation provides scholarships for mid-career public servants to undergo postgraduate degrees at Oxford University in England. Annually, the Foundation also convenes the AIG Public Leaders Programme in partnership with University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. This much sought after two-month learning opportunity is funded by the Foundation, thus enabling thousands of Nigerian civil servants and their contemporaries from other African nations to obtain the skills required to meet the challenges of a complex and rapidly changing continent.
Aigboje’s return is coming just in time for the 35th Annual General Meeting of Access Holdings in late April. The shareholders will be pleased to note that their bank is indeed in safe hands despite the sad event that occurred in that chilly California night.