Whenever I see a paragon, champion of transparency and accountability, I remember Muhammadu Buhari, retired military officer and gentleman, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

Whenever I hear that a man has shunned greed, avarice, rapacity, I remember Buhari. Whenever I see anyone pay scant attention to the ephemeral things of this life, I remember Buhari. Whenever I see disdain for filthy lucre, cupidity, Muhammadu Buhari comes to mind. You don’t have them more spartan, austere, and abstemious than that.

But we are not talking about Muhammadu Buhari today. Rather, our object is a man who is like him, in terms of frugality, financial accountability and transparency. Step forward, Professor Ishaq Olarewaju Oloyede, Registrar/Chief Executive of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).

I have watched the admissions organization since 2016 when Oloyede was appointed, and I’ve seen things that baffle me, that make me wonder whether they make them like this anymore. I had thought that after people like Buhari, the breed had vanished, evaporated. But now, I know that there will always be a remnant, who have not bowed their knees to Baal and Ashtoreth.

JAMB is by no means a revenue generating agency. It was not designed to be so. And over the decades, those who ran the Board never gave an indication that there was surplus money anywhere. They would even ask for bailouts, which government would likely grant.

Till Oloyede came. In his first year in office, the Professor of Islamic Studies and former Vice Chancellor, University of Ilorin, returned N7 billion into Federal Government coffers, as operating surplus. Holy Moses! It’s not raining cats and dogs, whales and hippos. It’s raining cash. And venue is JAMB.

But we ain’t seen nothing yet. Flash in the pan? By no means. In 2018, Oloyede did it again. And in 2019, 2020, 2021, till now. Jumping Jehoshaphat! About N30 billion has now been returned since the man came. And JAMB is the more efficient, the more methodical and systematized for it.

The question this brings to mind is; what has been happening to the same operating surplus over the decades? Of course, the answer blows in the winds. Till Buhari came. And Oloyede came. Birds of the same feather. Lovers of God. Haters of iniquity. Men who know that they would one day answer for every purloined naira, either before man, or before God. Today, Prof Oloyede is one of the ‘poster boys’ of the Buhari administration, which emphasizes transparency. We are proud of him.

On October 11, 2022, Oloyede received the Commander of the Niger (CON) National Honours Award from the President. It was a day after his 68th birthday, and exactly a week later, he bagged the Nigeria Excellence in Public Service Awards (NEAPS). These are just some of the scores of awards the man has received round the world. Befitting.

Don’t think with all the display of transparency, Oloyede does not have his traducers. He has. Doesn’t Buhari himself have? He has in loads. And some of the accusations include financial malfeasance, which they are never able to make stick. The lesson is; however clean you are, people will still throw mud at you. But continue to be clean anyway. If the Earth does not reward you, Heaven sure will. “Honesty is the best policy,” my own spartan educationist father would always tell his children. It’s 27 years today since he went to his eternal rest. May Papa Adesina sleep well, till the day of the Great Awakening.

JAMB under Oloyede is not only about returning of operating surplus, as important as that is. Hear Kunle Akogun, journalist and Corporate Affairs Director of the University of Ilorin, who lists initiatives under the Registrar as: “the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) for automation of admission process; the institution of Equal Opportunity Group for the conduct of the Universal Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for Blind Candidates; the expansion of the capacities of CBT centres for standardization purposes; the introduction of E-Ticketing (for Complaints), the introduction of the Integrated Brochure and Syllabus System (IBASS) for prompt delivery of admissions requirements; the use of Biometric Authentication to confirm validity of registration, the introduction of E-slip printing; the introduction of management dashboard to monitor registration and admission exercise real time.”

Others include “the use of CCTV cameras in all CBT centres to monitor the examination and registration process real time; and exemplary funds management; as well as prudent and judicious use of JAMB’s financial resources.”

He stressed that post-Oloyede era (he’s in his second and final term of five years), “all need to be consolidated upon in order to avoid the incidence of the well-known Nigerian syndrome of policy summersault and programme discontinuity that often characterize the advent of any new administration in this clime.” Very true.

I have seen a lot in government and out of it, to realize and recognize that graft, plunder, grand larceny, are the problems of Nigeria. And we won’t get out of it, except we all have a measure of Buhari, and of Oloyede in us. That is the way forward for our country.

AS millions of Nigerians suffer through the worst by-product of climate change they have endured since 2012 – savage floods that have submerged hundreds of villages, towns and farms nationwide – the Humanitarian Affairs Minister, Sadiya Farouk, has sparked controversy by claiming that Jigawa is the worst-hit state and that at least 10 states are more flood-impacted than Bayelsa. 

Whether you agree with Farouk or not – and I don’t – all Nigerians should be deeply concerned about the situation. Twenty-seven out of our 36 states are involved; and meteorological agencies have warned that states like Anambra, Delta, Cross River, Rivers, and Bayelsa may experience floods till the end of November.

Statistics announced in mid-October indicated that 2,504,095 persons had been affected, including 603 who had died, 2407 who had been injured and 1,302,589 survivors who had been displaced.

In mid-October, 82,053 dwelling places had been damaged or wrecked. Now, three weeks later, the figure must be much higher. The catalogue of flood-related woes is extensive. Waterborne and other diseases are rife. Entire communities have been paralysed or eradicated.

Well over 100,000 hectares of farmland have been inundated. Crops have been destroyed. Fishermen have been unable to fish. Food shortages have ensued. Prices of basic commodities have spiked. Roads have collapsed, rendering many areas inaccessible or impossible to leave. Thousands are stranded on “islands”.

In the creeks of my native Niger Delta region where graves have to be shallow because of the nature of the terrain, coffins containing the long-buried have been uprooted from their resting places and swept away to new locations. In some instances, the coffins have been forced open by aggressive water pressure and the corpses or skeletons within have been gruesomely ejected.

Nigeria has been tottering under the weight of numerous socio-economic, infrastructural, health-related, security and agricultural problems for years; and this flooding crisis has further exacerbated an already bad situation.

Several government bodies, NGOs, foreign charities, indigenous philanthropists and vote-seeking politicians are making significant donations.

But the assistance that the starving, penniless, homeless and sick are receiving is insufficient, random, poorly coordinated and tantamount to putting small sticking plasters on gaping wounds. There is also talk of corruption, with some officials being accused of hijacking cash and aid packages meant for victims.

Dr. Francis Atamuno, a civil servant, is managing one of the palliative delivery programmes in Bayelsa State and says that: “Progress is definitely being made but some of the areas that need help most can only be reached by boat; and there is no fuel for boats because the East-West road that links Bayelsa to the outside world is in pieces and fuel tankers cannot currently get here.”

Climate change is the main culprit but not the only cause of the flooding. In September, the authorities in neighbouring Cameroon released excess water from the Lagdo Dam. But despite having agreed, in the 1980s, to control overflows by building a corresponding dam in Adamawa State, Nigeria still hasn’t done so. 

Critics bemoan successive governments’ failure to prepare for disasters. And President Buhari recently reacted to these complaints by asking relevant ministries and state governments to develop a comprehensive flood prevention action plan.

Meanwhile, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, says that each of the three tiers of government – local, state and federal – has a sizeable budget at its disposal to deal with state-level natural disasters such as flooding.

“It is,” he says, “not clear why some of the state governments in question are not already drawing upon those funds to tackle the current emergency, and the general population is misguidedly calling on the Federal Government to intervene in all situations.”

Kester Dortimi, a Niger Deltan activist and lawyer, has started a change.org petition in a bid to make flooding a major election campaign issue.

“If Federal, State and Local governments were doing their jobs, they should, at least a decade ago, have established an integrated Flood Management Plan comprising structural and functional measures to prevent, control or adapt to flood events and to mitigate the impact of floods on the environment and population centres that are at risk…Distributing relief materials is not enough and is often done purely to corruptly line the distributors’ pockets.” 

He goes on to urge the electorate to “demand a social contract” and ask presidential, gubernatorial and legislative candidates of ALL political parties to tell the public how they intend to manage the flooding problem if they win.

I urge all Vanguard readers to sign Dortimi’s petition and hope that participants in town hall meetings or debates will insist that candidates answer this important question.

Floods are no respecters of bank balances or status – ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s ancestral village is one of the worst-hit areas and his residence was not spared when the deluge came.

There is, however, no doubt that when calamity strikes, have nots usually suffer much more than those cushioned by affluence.

And it’s worth recalling the comments that former President Barack Obama made on the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 23-31, 2005), the most devastating natural disaster in American history (1800 deaths and damage to buildings, businesses, etc, totalling $125 billion).

Addressing a crowd in New Orleans in 2015, in the Lower Ninth Ward of the city – which is mostly populated by low-income blacks who were treated appallingly during and after the historic storm – Obama said: “What started as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster – a failure of government to look out for its own citizens.”

As the weakest members of Nigerian society try to cling onto their sanity and try to stay alive in murky treacherous waters, one can only hope that the traumas they are going through will not be forgotten by the next President.

“Never again,” would be a great campaign slogan for any flagbearer who cares enough to dynamically change the flood management narrative. 

The slogan; go and verify has been made popular by Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party. And he uses it recklessly even when some of the information he is churning out are false. I am not surprised because he is a regular politician. He can go to any length to woo the electorate in return for votes during elections.

Peter Obi is good because he is a master of the mind game. He understands the people’s psyche and how and when to make them gullible. This much has characterized his public outings since his romance with the Labour party began after the edge out from the PDP in the buildup to the presidential primaries.

However, I have a challenge with toying with the emotional sensibilities of the people whom he aspires to rule come 2023. Have we ever wondered why he is entrenched with the single narrative? ” I, Peter Obi, paid pensioners, I left monies in Anambra state coffers, I built roads, I built hospitals, I carry my bag myself, I have only one pair of shoes, I don’t have any house outside of Onitsha” etc. The list is endless and indicates that Peter Obi is a saint, whose gospel the Nigerian people must believe hook, line and sinker.

A good feat in the South East region. Even at that, eradicating polio in Nigeria is a national concern. All governors elected by the people are duty-bound to work towards eradicating polio with the relevant federal government agencies. It was the state’s resources at work, not his personal resources. And likewise, other state governors did make efforts towards eradicating polio. This claim was false and typical of Peter Obi.
Peter Obi also claimed governors formed the Eastern Security Network (ESN) in the south-east. In his words, “The Eastern Security Network was formed by the government of eastern states. The governors formed the security team; how can I condemn them? I’ve spoken about sit-at-home and I can tell you there was even a place they mentioned me. Everything I say, go and verify”.

This is another one that failed verification as ESN was the creation of the Indigenous People of Biafra in 2020 with the primary responsibility to protect the south-east from terrorists and other criminal elements.

Peter Obi’s claim that Nigeria’s total export was less than 30 billion US dollars in 2021 also shook the airwaves. “Nigeria is a country with 923,000 square kilometres of land and a population of 200 million people. God blessed us with oil and other resources. We have over 100 million people living in poverty. But to show that we are not a producing country, last year, our total export, including oil, was less than 30 billion dollars; that is why we can’t find dollars today.”

However, a report by the National Bureau of Statistics titled “Foreign Trade in Goods Statistics (Q4 2021)” shows that Nigeria’s total exports amounted to $47 billion (18.9 trillion naira in 2021 while total imports stood at N20.84 trillion.

This was also false because, at the time, the Global Peace Index released annually by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace, known globally to give such rankings, ranked Nigeria 16th among the least secure countries to live in. Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Yemen and Iraq were the five least secure countries.

These and many more were the hallmarks of the Peter Obi outings. I often wonder whether these actions are deliberate or a function of grandstanding. I think they are intentional and a function of grandstanding, which smacks of deceit in my opinion. I can safely say Peter Obi might be suffering from Mythomania and Pseudologia fantastica, a chronic compulsive or habitual lying behaviour.

People suffering from Mythomania and Pseudologia fantastica are known for creating a false history, such as saying they’ve achieved or experienced something they haven’t. Such people get an instant high by spinning stories and telling them to people. And the lies are very extravagant and exaggerated. That is Peter Obi for you in his elements.

And to confirm this, he has not been quoted to have commended those that worked with him. It has been about him and what he did as governor. Maybe he is the all-knowing type that doesn’t see any good in the efforts of others other than himself. He is also one individual that wants all the glory. And to achieve this, he goes overboard in making outright insinuations and illogical conclusions.

I am not convinced this is what Nigerians need at this critical point of our existence. We want a president that would put issues in proper perspective and not give false hope to the people. We want a president who would recognize the efforts of others and give credit when necessary and not distort facts in a masturbatory drive for self-glory.

At this point, I want to encourage Nigerians to take the time to verify any gospel from Saint Peter Obi. He can’t continue to quote what happened in the Book of Jeremiah in Job. And he can’t also concoct events in his head and pass them on as reality.

We can’t attain any progress with a pathological liar as president. This is why Peter Obi remains a joke taken too far. It is my prayer that in the weeks and months ahead, Nigerians will see the game plan of Peter Obi. And also, we should expect more fallacies from his stable. Many have indeed been deceived. This is a shame.

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher born in 1558 in his 1651 book titled Leviathan, painted a picture of a state of nature where life is “solitary poor, nasty, brutish and short”. A world where, man who is predatory, cruel and inhuman “is a wolf to another man” ((Homos Homini est). Today, not much has changed. Life is still about the survival of the fittest. Globalisation, today’s reigning god is in itself another form of slavery in a world where only about five percent controls the resources of the world.

 The world remains an organized anarchy where the privileged wants an unfettered freedom to preside over an empire of slaves. The laws are their laws and by extension also our laws. They install government of their choice to implement their laws (every government has the imprimatur of the business class). After cornering a disproportionate share of the resources, the owners of society establish the newspaper publications and TV broadcasting stations to protect their loot by legitimizing their worldview no matter how warped. They insist, the media is a market place of ideas. But it is their dominant ideas and not our own ideas. They then employ intellectuals who humour themselves as editors, news anchors and gate keepers to fight their intra elite wars. 

There is therefore no independent media. But rather than hearkening to the admonition of Babatunde Jose, the doyen of Nigerian press that journalists must learn how to walk the tight rope while fighting their masters’ wars, Nigerian journalists humour themselves with false sense of importance.  They latched on to freedom of the press which stemmed from John Milton 1664 ‘Areopaqitica’s argument that ‘rational beings are capable of using reason to distinguish right from wrong and good from bad’. But we momentarily forget we are dealing with an insane few who feed on the sweat and blood of others while telling us that journalism serves as a watchdog over private and government action. It is as if such freedom can change our relationship with greedy media owners and the government they install to implement their laws?

And precisely because journalists often miss the link between government and the owners of society, government is always seen as Leviathan- a huge fearful sea dog who must be brought down. Newspaper proprietors and TV station owners, driven only by profit motivation only pay slave wages to journalists. Gratuity is considered gratuitous. Many journalists retired into penury and die as a result of health challenges. Instead of fighting evil men in government, and they are plenty in Buhari’s government, both the newspaper and the electronic media are obsessed with bringing down government, their only ally.

Stranded with a colleague between Ogun State and Lagos during the EndSARS misdirected aggression of anger and frustration by youths in 2020, I had called about four of my former colleagues in the media houses to offer some advice. Their reaction was Buhari must be taught a lesson. Some of them later became victims.

The truth is that there is no independent media anywhere in the world. Media owners are not interested in changing society and contrary to the grandstanding of some current media stars, media are never set up for ethical revolution. Every publisher or proprietor has an agenda.

 Thus the demand of Lagos Times, Anglo Africa and Nigerian Pioneer, established between 1881 and 1914 from the colonial administration was ‘increased participation of blacks in politics and the economy’. Of those established between 1922-1947, the Nigerian Daily Times was pro-establishment for commercial gains, Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot and Obafemi Awolowo’s Tribune were critical of colonial masters but were tied to political fortunes of their founders.

Of those that came between 1979-1982, the National Concord established by MKO Abiola, a military contractor spoke of “harmony justice and progress for all Nigerians” but was on a personal vendetta against Awolowo and his papers while The Guardian set up by Alex Ibru, another military contractor spoke of a need to “uphold  justice and probity in public life and equal protection under the law” was in fact established to protect his family business empire.

Of course ThisDay, and by extension, ARISE Television were not set up to change society but as commercial enterprise driven by profit. That perhaps explain why it pioneered news commercialization by selling its ‘solu’s and ‘semi-solus’ positions in the name of ‘wrap around’, for cash, gave ‘governor of the year’ trophies to serving governors they were expected to hold accountable and bankers who were later indicted by the courts for misapplication of depositors’ funds to buy properties in Dubai and private jets in the name of their children.

Were AIT set up to promote the health of the nation, its  chairman would not have partaken in the ‘Dazukigate’ to the tune of N2b which his lawyers claimed were bills for media consultations he claimed to have carried out privately for ex-President Goodluck Jonathan. And indeed if Channels and TVC stations were set up to sanitise Nigerian society as some of the young journalists serving them would want us to believe, they will have to first reconcile ‘news-commercialisation’ through which prime times are sold allegedly for as much as N10 million to notably state governors who dish out propaganda materials that assault peoples sensibilities.

Journalists who give the impression their stations are engaged on a mission for a national rebirth should give Nigerians a break. It was not a surprise that Major General Haruna, a former Federal Commissioner of Information and Culture (1975-77) rudely interrupted and heckled endlessly by Rufai Oseni while condemning  some western countries over the manner the alarm about elevated risk of terror attack in Abuja was managed, had to remind him his proprietor has an agenda for setting up the ARISE platform while also advising him to be less judgmental as a journalist. I am not sure if Oseni ever came across a book written by  General Haruna’s  back in 1979/80 where he admonished Nigerian journalists to put Nigeria first because there would be nowhere to practice their  trade if the country implodes.

But that did not stop irrepressible Rufai Oseni from declaring last Monday that refusal to participate on debate organized by ARISE by any presidential candidate would amount to a disrespect for Nigerians. Apparently he forgets ‘the medium is the news” His principal Prince Nduka Obaigbena is a staunch member of PDP, under which he once contested for a senate seat. It is impossible even to the nonpartisan not to see the ceaseless assault, disrespect and disparagement of the person of Asiwaju Tinubu by Oseni and some ARISE crew as an hatchet job to please a principal who from his creative and commercial exploits referred to above has abundantly demonstrated he did not set up his platforms for ethical revolution.

Utter insensitivity to the feelings and rights of invited guests, insults and disregard for professional ethics can only lead to trust deficit while self-righteous indignation and daily lamentation about insecurity, corruption economic stagnation which are mere symptoms of our unresolved national question only betrays lack of understanding of how society works and the nature of our own crisis of nation building.