
OTHERS' VIEWS
[OPINION] Insecurity Scourge: Can Civilians Owning CCTV or Bearing Arms End It? - Magnus Onyibe
AdminIn the course of delivering a lecture at Al-Hakim University in Ilorin, Kwara State, on Thursday, April 17, the Inspector General of Police, IGP Kayode Egbetokun, PhD, implored Nigerians to acquire Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras to be installed in their residences and places of work.
He argued that it is part of the much-vaunted, but yet-to-be-implemented, state/community policing initiative.
My immediate reaction as soon as I read the news in the mass media was: Good idea, but how feasible is it for the average Nigerian to procure CCTV at such prohibitive cost, and how can it be operated without a stable supply of electricity?
Has the idea been put through the crucible of critical thinking?
Shortly after the IGP’s proposal, on Saturday, April 19, a highly respected former Defence Minister and ex-Chief of Army Staff, T.Y. Danjuma, took an extreme position by proposing that civilians should defend themselves because the government has failed to do so — and that they will perish if they do not resort to self-help. Addressing a large gathering, he reportedly told his people: “I once asked you to rise and defend yourselves. I am still repeating it today with more seriousness — rise and defend yourselves. The killers have obtained sophisticated arms; we don’t know where they got them. But you people should also ask to get arms wherever they got theirs. You must defend yourselves against the killers. You should know they are well-armed to kill you and ready to take your land. Be ready for them — they are also humans like you.”
Impliedly, the Army General is advocating that civilians should bear arms to protect themselves from the vicious invaders that appear hell-bent on killing them.
That is not the first time Gen. Danjuma has made such a call.
Based on records, he has done so twice.
My immediate reaction when I read his advice was: Has this idea of fire-for-fire been thought through? While it may appear like a plausible short-term solution, in the long run, would mutual self-destruction be an efficacious response to the seemingly intractable internal insecurity challenge?
To me, it echoes the era of nuclear bomb proliferation — a reckless enterprise — and the current non-nuclear arms proliferation agreement, which was reached when it became apparent that a nuclear arms race would result in the mutual destruction of mankind.
Could the license to kill or be killed be a reasonable solution to the killings by outlaws engaging in the orgy of slaughter in Nigeria’s countryside? Would solving one security challenge in that manner not trigger another?
Very importantly, have we, as a nation, taken a critical look at the experience of the United States of America, where the system of civilians bearing arms has resulted in a gun epidemic? One so debilitating that it has defied solutions, even by the leaders of the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world such the death tally may be comparable to that of nations at war?
I think if we devote enough time to doing due diligence on the call for civilians to bear arms, more Nigerians will dread the prospect than those who desire it.
In any case, at least the IGP’s proposition on civilian CCTV ownership marks a shift in the position of the Police Force, which has long been opposed to the concept of state police.
This is based on the presentation made by the IGP in the past.
In making his case against the decentralization of the police force, the IGP had taken a position against the birthing of state police for the reasons of being prone to abuse by politicians amongst other factors.
However, in my view, the difference between the concept of state police and community police may lie in the fact that the former will be controlled by the respective state governors, while the latter will still be centrally controlled by the IGP in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja — at least there is a consensus that the current framework of policing in Nigeria is inadequate.
As such, there is a need for a paradigm shift.
Since the return of multi-party democracy in Nigeria in 1999, I have consistently advocated for a state policing system.
While President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999–2007) was the first to moot the idea — when criminality started rising around the country, a reflection of the freedom that came with nascent democratic rule after decades of military dictatorships — the idea has suffered a stillbirth, 25 years later.
By the same token, I have often wondered aloud why the Police Force, which is constitutionally charged with the responsibility of maintaining internal law and order, has been emasculated within the country’s security architecture.
Again, based on former President Obasanjo’s military background as an ex-military Head of State, it was a natural course of action for him to resort to the use of military force instead of the police to curb internal insecurity.
As such, the police—already defunded and hobbled by multiple military regimes to prevent it from posing a threat during Nigeria’s long period under military rule—had been rendered almost comatose.
Somehow, that military kinetic approach to enforcing internal security, as opposed to the more appropriate, less militarized, and non-kinetic method in which the police are adept and more efficacious, has been sustained—with a consequential deterioration in the level of security and safety of lives and property in our country.
We will delve into the apparent usurpation of the role of the police in internal security by the military, whose primary responsibility is to defend our country against external threats.
Yet, the armed forces have taken over the role of the police and, in the process, based on available records, have expended more than an estimated $16 billion between 2012 and 2018 on security—even though Nigeria has not been at war with any other country.
Rather, our country has been faced with the menace of non-state actors: religious insurgents exhibiting extremism; bandits who initially engaged in cattle rustling but have scaled up to kidnapping for ransom; and the perennial clashes between farmers and herders, whose animals destroy crops. This has been worsened by land-grabbing schemes of nomadic herdsmen, compounded by a new strain of fortune seekers stirring up insecurity, especially in areas rich in solid minerals. The agenda of this last category of outlaws is to cause mayhem in specific locations so they can illegally extract our country’s natural resources—such as rare earth minerals—after rendering the targeted areas ungovernable.
While the reality is that it is the police who have the mandate—and are specifically trained—to deal with the type of criminal activities wrecking our country, as highlighted above, the military has been executing the task of trying to maintain peace, a task for which it is ill-equipped. In my view, that is one of the key reasons the marauders have been having the upper hand and why insecurity in Nigeria has been on an upward trend.
For instance, while N6.11 trillion has been allocated to the Ministry of Defence in the 2025 budget of N49.74 trillion, only N1.1 trillion was provided for the Ministry of Police Affairs.
So, while the military is getting an elephant-sized allocation, the police have been given an ant-sized share of funds in the 2025 budget.
This is even though ensuring the internal security of lives and property is the police’s constitutionally assigned responsibility.
Be that as it may, one is not oblivious to the fact that the Ministry of Defence covers the Army, Air Force, and Navy, which explains its N6.11 trillion budget. Nevertheless, since internal security falls within the purview of the police, it should have received the lion’s share of the funds devoted to keeping Nigerians and their property safe and secure within the country.
Before delving further into the non-prioritization of police funding to take charge of internal security—while emphasis continues to be placed on funding the military, which has received the highest allocation in yearly budgets over the past 25 years—let us first examine the IGP’s proposition that Nigerians acquire CCTV as part of his concept of community policing and as a citizen contribution toward stemming the crisis of insecurity, which has reached alarming proportions in our beloved country.
To be sure, the idea of Nigerians acquiring CCTV is quite laudable. In fact, the cities of London, Dubai, and New York are practically forests of CCTV cameras, which have proven efficacious in crime control.
But from the point of view of affordability for Nigerians, it is very expensive to acquire and operate. As such, it may be an unrealistic expectation.
The challenge is especially compounded by the lack of a steady electricity supply that continues to plague our country.
Therefore, to make CCTV affordable for the average Nigerian—at least initially—the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) should remove the import duty on it.
Subsequently, the government should provide funding support for a few firms to begin assembling CCTV systems locally, thereby reducing costs.
The selection of the firms to be supported should be done through an open and competitive bidding process.
Imports should not be allowed to continue beyond 18–24 months, within which time the infrastructure and capacity to assemble the items locally would be expected to develop.
To boost local assembly, there must be a government support scheme to empower the same firms assembling CCTV cameras to also assemble solar panels and drones, as part of a bundled package.
They should likewise assemble electricity meters, Point-of-Sale (PoS) machines, and ATMs, using Completely Knocked Down (CKD) units imported and assembled by Nigerian workers.
The production of these items is not rocket science, and private firms can establish joint ventures (JVs) with European, North and South American, or Asian companies—including Chinese, Korean, and Indian manufacturers. It may recalled that back in the day, Adebowale Industries, a local entrepreneur was assembling radio, television sets, and other electronic gadgets here in Nigeria.
Government support—through subsidies, equity investments via the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI), tax holidays, and customs duty exemptions—must be guaranteed.
In the same vein, the newly established CreditCorp should be mandated to provide Nigerians with credit facilities to acquire CCTVs and solar panels assembled locally. This would not only enhance security but also create jobs and increase the country’s productivity quotient.
With a population of over 220 million, Nigeria has a sufficiently large market to justify local production.
I am convinced that this proposition is a win-win: security will be improved through widespread CCTV coverage, people will feel safe enough to return to farms and factories, job creation will rise, and, by extension, the economy will grow—ultimately boosting our GDP.
That is not all. There’s also the added value of technology transfer, as Nigerians working in these assembly plants will learn to build these gadgets through collaboration with foreign technical partners.
That said, one fact that must not be ignored is that with the IGP’s proposition for citizens to acquire CCTV, the responsibility for monitoring crime—to proactively prevent it or to track and apprehend criminals—is being shifted from the government to the people.
But perhaps this shift is justified, as it has been proven that public funds invested directly in citizens tend to yield better returns than those funneled through government contractors, which often fall victim to corruption.
As may be recalled, in 2012 or thereabouts, a contract was awarded to ZTE Corporation of China for $470 million to install 2,000 solar-powered CCTV cameras across Nigeria.
According to a House of Representatives ad hoc committee that investigated the deal, ZTE collected a $100 million upfront payment but only installed 40 cameras—most of which remain non-functional.
The committee described the project as a monumental failure, attributing the outcome to corruption and mismanagement. The goal of the initiative had been to monitor and deter crime in Lagos, the commercial nerve center, and Abuja, the nation’s capital.
Therefore, it’s perhaps a credit to the creative ingenuity of the current IGP that he is seeking to circumvent the well-known corruption associated with government contracts by pivoting CCTV ownership to citizens. I would add that such acquisition should be supported by the government.
Just imagine if the $470 million earmarked for ZTE in 2012 had instead been used to subsidize individual CCTV ownership under a model like the one now proposed by IGP Egbetokun and expanded upon here.
Had that approach been adopted back then, perhaps today’s alarming insecurity levels would either not exist or would be drastically reduced, as criminals would have had no hiding places.
Incidentally, the same scourge of corruption that scuttled the deployment of CCTV cameras in Abuja and Lagos has characterized the military’s kinetic approach to combating insecurity in Nigeria—a crisis now in its 25th year, having started during Obasanjo’s administration in 1999.
In the 2014 national budget, about $2.5 billion was allocated to security agencies under the supervision of then National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki.
Following the defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP in 2015 and the takeover by Muhammadu Buhari and the APC, allegations surfaced that the security funds had been misappropriated and diverted to fund the 2015 elections.
At this point, it is important to examine how insecurity started and degenerated to the current dire state.
It began as a form of religious insurgency, following the adoption of Sharia law (a legal and moral code based on Islamic principles) in Zamfara State during Obasanjo’s presidency in 1999.
The religious extremism that accompanied the law was soon hijacked and transformed into a front for political thuggery and criminality.
Curiously, since that time, mineral-rich Zamfara has consistently been a hotspot for insecurity in Nigeria.
Arising from this, I believe that religion is another factor fueling insecurity in the country.
Some of the perpetrators of heinous crimes have used the pretense of jihad—a claim that many Islamic clerics have rightly denounced—to commit atrocities. These criminals have killed both Christians and Muslims indiscriminately.
Once those hiding under the guise of religion to perpetrate crimes bordering on genocide and ethnic cleansing are exposed and apprehended, our security agencies will be in a stronger position to restore peace.
In addition to religion, another major factor driving insecurity is external influence.
There are foreign interests behind the chaos in states rich in rare earth minerals. These actors fund criminal activities to make such areas ungovernable, thus enabling illegal mining and exploitation of resources.
They began in Zamfara and have now shifted their attention to Plateau State, which is rich in lithium and other valuable minerals.
One clear thing is that the same playbook criminals have been using in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for about 100 years is now being deployed in Nigeria.
Strikingly, what is happening in Darfur, South Sudan—defined by armed conflicts driven by external interests in fossil fuel resources over the past five decades—is not dissimilar.
Due to a gap in policing in our country, foreigners are roaming freely in our hinterlands, mapping out resources. In some cases, we’ve even seen trending videos of foreigners handing out cash to our police officers—presumably as compensation for favors.
In more security-conscious climes, foreigners are not allowed to travel into the hinterlands, let alone contest for resources with locals without proper licensing.
But in Nigeria, foreigners are present in our forests and solid mineral sites, extracting and carting away natural resources under the radar.
At one point, small propeller airplanes were landing on narrow paths in Zamfara State, carting away precious stones to unknown destinations for processing—allegedly in connivance with security forces.
Aside from their official duties of protecting public officers and Very Important Personalities (VIPs), some police personnel have been seen offering protection to individuals of questionable character—people they ought to be apprehending. These individuals then move around intimidating ordinary Nigerians with loud sirens and vehicle convoys while citizens go about their daily struggle to eke out a living.
With a paltry police strength of about 400,000 officers in a country with an estimated population of 220 million—and many of them engaged in VIP protection—there are not enough personnel to respond adequately where marauders strike.
As a result, there have been multiple instances where bandits return to previously attacked locations within days or weeks to wreak more havoc on unprotected victims.
One cannot fathom why the operationalization of state or community policing remains in abeyance and why the police force continues to be underfunded.
We have a youth bulge in this country. I do not understand why the authorities have not embarked on a massive recruitment drive to enlist and train young Nigerians into the police force to secure the hinterlands and repel marauders.
We also need a dedicated forest police unit—an idea previously proposed by the Minister of Solid Minerals, Dr. Dele Alake. This specialized force would patrol forests and protect our natural resources, which are the primary targets of criminal syndicates fomenting violence in resource-rich areas.
In addition to the regular police force, I would argue that it is time to reintroduce the National Guard—originally established by General Ibrahim Babangida—as an elite police unit to tackle the evolving security threats across the country.
The recent tragic events in Plateau and Benue States, where numerous lives have been lost, highlight the urgency of adopting extraordinary measures to combat insecurity.
Commendably, in his Easter message, President Tinubu, while felicitating with Christians, also commiserated with those who lost loved ones in the attacks, stating:
“Just as Christ triumphed over death, so too shall our country triumph over every challenge we face.”
He went further to reassure Nigerians:
“I have given clear directives to the Armed Forces and all relevant security agencies to end insecurity decisively and without delay.”
Given President Tinubu’s record of thinking outside the box, we can hope that his directive to the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu—himself a retired Assistant Inspector General of Police—will yield positive results.
That said, one pressing question remains: Will putting the police at the center of the renewed effort to restore peace lead to a lasting solution to the resurgent insecurity?
Well, we won’t know until we try.
Also, is this resurgence in violence connected to the politics of 2027, when the next electoral cycle begins?
Time will reveal the truth as the situation unfolds.
My argument for a more central role for the police in internal security is based on the fact that they are better trained in managing civil conflicts. How could the military have been involved in the infamous Lekki, Lagos toll gate killing of protesters in 2020 during the Endsars riots, if it was not involved in internal security?
Some pundits argue that insecurity has persisted because the military—whose expertise is in kinetic warfare—has been overwhelmed, as what is truly needed are policing skills to handle banditry, inter-communal conflicts, and various criminal activities.
Even the military has admitted that non-kinetic approaches might yield better results than the military tactics they’ve traditionally relied on. In fact, they have begun shifting toward non-kinetic strategies.
So why is the police—naturally more adept at non-kinetic methods—not being empowered to take the lead in a combined military-police strategy?
Let me be clear: I have nothing against our brave military men and women. I greatly admire them.
My father, David Ebiye-Onyibe, was a soldier who fought in World War II and the Nigerian Civil War as a medic. He died in active service on December 28, 1970, when I was a toddler.
After his passing, I was taken to Benin City from Agbor to sit for the entrance exam into the Nigerian Military School, but I was underage and couldn’t be admitted.
Because of that history, I have an eternal admiration for the military, and I always feel a sense of pride when, at airports abroad, uniformed service members receive special recognition through public announcements and are offered privileges and perks.
That said, beyond the inability of the military to play the role of internal security agent effectively, another major reason insecurity persists in Nigeria is religion.
Some of the criminals behind these atrocities are deceived into believing they are engaging in jihad, not realizing they are pawns feeding the greed of a few powerful kingpins.
Fortunately, some traditional rulers and Islamic clerics in the North have taken a stand, distancing themselves from the terrorists and condemning the senseless violence that has devastated lives and properties in the hinterlands.
Once these impostors—those hiding under the cloak of religion—are exposed and held accountable, our security agencies will be better positioned to restore peace and harmony among Nigeria’s many ethnic groups.
More importantly, we must confront the external factors in the rising insecurity.
There are foreign elements funding criminality in areas rich in rare earth minerals—especially in Plateau State—so they can operate in lawless conditions.
This same method was used in Zamfara, and now the focus has shifted to Plateau, largely because of its lithium deposits.
It’s the same strategy that has been in use in the DRC for over a century.
And just as external powers once armed the Janjaweed militia in Darfur, South Sudan, similar external forces are at play here.
Although the Nigerian military has made gains—repelling some attacks and neutralizing notorious gang leaders—millions still live in fear, especially in remote areas where the government seems distant and unresponsive.
Clearly, there’s a gaping hole in our policing architecture.
I cannot fathom why the implementation of state or community policing is still pending, or why the police remain poorly funded.
We have a youth bulge and a high unemployment rate.
Why aren’t our leaders seizing this opportunity to train and engage young people in law enforcement, transforming them into productive contributors to national security?
I do not understand why a massive recruitment drive into the police force has not been initiated—complete with cutting-edge training, equipment, and high-tech tools to secure our forests and hinterlands.
We also urgently need the forest police unit that Dr. Dele Alake proposed—dedicated to protecting our natural resources and fending off criminal syndicates.
Furthermore, I believe it’s time to reintroduce the National Guard, created under Babangida, to serve as an elite security force capable of handling the evolving security challenges.
General T.Y. Danjuma’s extreme position—encouraging self-defense among his people—may have stemmed from a deep sense of helplessness and frustration.
His home state, Taraba, as well as Benue and Plateau, has seen consistent attacks and loss of lives.
While not disputing anything Gen. Danjuma said, a resort to self-help in the form of widespread armament among civilians may have unintended consequences.
If inter-communal conflicts arise, will these weapons not be turned against fellow Nigerians over land disputes or cultural disagreements?
This is why we must take seriously the IGP’s call for citizens to own CCTV systems, and Gen. Danjuma’s warning, both of which highlight the rising wave of killings in recent weeks.
If the situation improves through a new paradigm shift in security—placing the police at the forefront, bolstered by strategic military support—then perhaps the urgency for civilians to arm themselves will diminish.
Before then Nigerians can not wait to exhale by having the yoke of insecurity removed as part of the existential challenge hindering them from being productive to self and society.
ONYIBE, an entrepreneur, public policy analyst, democracy advocate, author, and development strategist.
Caleb Muftwang, the Governor of Plateau, made a grave mistake by hosting the Ambassador of Israel, an ethno-fascist, genocidal, child-killing, terrorist & apartheid nation in his state. I watched the show of shame & almost threw up.
As a Christian how does this Muftwang feel about receiving mass murderers, ethnic cleansers & religious bigots in his official residence?
More importantly, as a human being, how can he sleep at night after doing this?
Outside of that does he not know about the role that Israel & her strongest allies are playing in the killings in the North & even in his own state?
Does he not know who is really behind the terrorists that have plagued our nation both North & South?
Does he not know who is really benefiting from the carnage & land-grabbing?
Does he not know that their objective is to plunge us into a civil & religious war whilst they pick up the pieces?
Someone tell him to ask his Zionist friends who created, founded, funds and arms ISIS, ISWAP, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Al Qaeda & virtually every other terrorist organisation in the world.
Tell him to ask them who uses these evil forces to divide, destabilise & destroy the foreign nations which they seek to control & dominate.
Tell him to ask them why none of the terrorist organisations mentioned above have EVER attacked Israel or targetted the Israelis?
Tell him to ask them who funded and sold arms to the Biafrans more than anyone else during our civil war.
Tell him to ask them how African Jews from Ethiopia (known as the Falashas) that are seeking to become Israeli nationals are treated in the Zionist state and how they are subjected to and injected with strange and toxic chemicals in order to prevent them from having children and "contaminating" the white/European bloodline of the non-semitic Ashkazi Jews that rule that dark and accursed country.
Receiving the emissary of an insensitive & callous beast, a bloodthirsty tyrant, a feral psychopath & a delusional meglomaniac like Bibi Netanyahu & showering accolades on him is an insult to the martyred women & children of Gaza & a big slap on the face of those that are fighting Israeli occupation in Palestine.
Worst still in doing so the Governor has inflicted a deep spiritual wound on himself & his Government.
Bringing a Jewish snake into your house will not help you to solve your problems in Plateau state no matter what they promise to do for you: it will only make them worse.
As they say, "beware of the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts!" The Trojans learnt this lesson the hard way! Let us hope the same fate does not befall you.
Meanwhile did your guest tell you that they spit on Christians in his country?
Did he tell you that according to their holy book known as the Talmud, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was a liar and a rogue and is now burning in hell whilst swimming in a pool of human faeces?
Did he tell you that they discriminate against both Christians and Muslims and that they detain and slaughter them like flies?
I learnt that the day after he left Plateau state no less than 100 more people were killed by the terrorists: why am I not surprised?
This Muftwang has much to learn!
(Chief Femi Fani-Kayode is the Sadaukin Shinkafi, the Wakilin Doka Potiskum, the Otunba Joga Orile, a former Minister of Culture and Tourism, a former Ministerof Aviation and a former Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs to President Olusegun Obasanjo)
I found myself inventing that verse as today’s headline. The verse came sounding like “The Lord is my shepherd/ I Shall not want…” The twenty-third Psalm. Yesterday was Easter Sunday; today is Easter Monday. All Judases are shamed.
Life here is bitter as brine. The green pastures are withered. The still waters are poisoned. More and more, victims fall in undeclared wars in Benue and Plateau. Terrorists rebrand and relaunch in Borno and Niger and Zamfara. The Commander-in-Chief is absent in flesh, in body and soul. But I must be quiet, because the president is my brother.
Some twenty-something years ago, one of us (I can’t remember who the person was) blurted out a question:
“The name of your governor, ‘Alamiyeseigha’, reads like a tongue-twisting clause. What does it mean?”
Our guest was the Bayelsa State Commissioner for Information.
The guest sat up, grinned and looked round the Tribune boardroom. She then smiled out the answer.
I thought that was deep. I quickly got it stored in the depth of my brain. True. God is never wrong. But brother? An argument would have ensued but that commissioner, Mrs Ruth Benamaisia Opia, went into an intelligent analysis of how and when a brother is deemed not wrong: She said a brother is never wrong in the presence of outsiders. She might be right. Among her audience were a people whose own culture instructs them to first deal with the fox before spanking the cock. They also say you don’t sell your brother cheap; if you do, you won’t be able to buy him back expensive.
“Kin-blood is not spoiled by water.” That is how 12th-century German poet, Heinrich der Glîchezære, couches it in his epic, Reinhart Fuchs (Reynard the Fox). I am supposed to love and be loyal to the king because he is my brother. Is my brother, the king, supposed to love and be loyal to me? Christian scholar, T. L. Westow, in his ‘Who is my Brother?’ published in May 1964, declares that “nobody can eat for somebody else.” That may be true in biology; it is not true in politics. What do you think my brother, the president, is doing on my behalf in Europe? He has been there for the past two weeks.
Because my brother is the president, he can do anything and get away with it. And he has been doing it. The president is the law. He keeps a very good company in the US President Donald Trump. Last week, Trump complained about his country’s Federal Reserves chair, Jerome Powell. “I’m not happy with him. I don’t think Powell is doing the job. He will leave if I ask him to.” An American reacted: “Why has anybody but Trump run anything? Just get rid of congress, senate, Supreme Court, etc. He’s so smart; he can run everything.” It is too late to recommend the same here. President Bola Tinubu is the smartest somebody ever created. He had been the law long before he became president. Presidential powers have only enlarged his coast, and we are happy and grateful for the answered prayers.
I have no problem with Tinubu staying put abroad. The only issue I have with it is that in his absence, Muhammadu Buhari’s eunuch is having an erection again. I don’t like that. It is risky. While I agonise over the resurgent eunuchs, I will not stop stopping critics from hampering my president with the constitution and all its provisions. Scrap the law, scrap the courts, the legislature, everything; sack the governors, give the president their functions and budgets. Make him President and Governor General of the federation. Trash all the scrapped. Scrap Abuja and let the super man reign from wherever he finds comfort. Why not?
My brother, the president, is in Europe, running the country effectively unseen like an unseen poem. It is my duty as a brother to expose the ignorance of critics who say the president residing abroad is immoral and illegal. I should tell such critics that the people who created Nigeria started Nigeria with that arrangement. When the two Nigerias were brought together in 1914, the first ‘president’ (nicknamed Governor General) reigned six months in Nigeria; four and a half months in London; one and half months cruising on the high seas. Lord Lugard gave his employers that condition and he got it, he maintained and enjoyed it for several years. A befitting office with full complement of competent staff was even provided for him righ t inside the colonial office in London. That is our history.
Shakespeare says there is no darkness but ignorance. Ignorant critics say my brother does not delegate as the constitution dictates. They should read history. Our president’s ancestor, Lord Lugard had two deputies called Assistant Governors. From 1914 when he took charge till he left in 1919, he delegated neither power nor responsibility to any of them. There were complaints and grumblings, home and abroad; the Governor-General ignored them all. Nothing happened. Nothing will happen if President Tinubu keeps that foundational tradition alive. He has a duty to run his government undisturbed from the Moon, even from inside the Sun.
If my brother is not ready for home, it is my duty to beg him to stay back wherever he is. It is also my duty to attack his attackers here. He should not rush home after these Easter holidays simply because sibling rivalry is pushing some of our bad brothers to demand his immediate homecoming. The president should work harder in London – or cross the English Channel back to Paris, and continue where he stopped.
Last week, from wherever he was, the president set up an eight-man committee on his pet census project, five out of the eight members are from his sitting room. Because he is my brother, I am not supposed to mention this and say he was wrong to use his household to rule the whole world.
For those who are not happy that five brothers out of eight make the list of Tinubu’s census committee, I recommend, in the spirit of this Easter season, ‘The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard’. It is a Bible passage:
“Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Him with her sons, kneeling down and asking something from Him.
“And He said to her, ‘What do you wish?’”
“She said to Him, ‘Grant that these two sons of mine may sit, one on Your right hand and the other on the left, in Your kingdom.’” (Mathew 20:20,21).
What you just read is a brother to the right; his blood brother to the left. The Master was number one. The brothers would be numbers two and three. And there were twelve disciples. The two brothers were John and James. Whose cousins or nephews were they? Find out whose sister their mother, Salome, was.
Some neighbours are already saying that without them in 2027 my brother will be sent back home empty-handed. They should shut up, and go and listen to Juju music Commander Ebenezer Obey. He warns that no one should vow that without them their friend won’t find food to eat. They should not say that again Sustenance is God’s. He is the only provider. If they want war in 2027, my brother will give them. I will watch the bull fight; my popcorn is ordered.
So, those who are not happy with my brother’s nepotism should go drink iced water. They should wait for their own time. Nigeria is a tripod. Every good and every bad must get entered in the country’s balance sheet. Muhammadu Buhari had his own fill. We shouted, but Bayajidda II pointed us to his kurmo (deaf) ears. Goodluck Jonathan had aides who helped him do his own so well that he became Azikiwe.
I read Keith Ferrazzi’s ‘Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success.’ But I will not join outsiders to quote that book and warn the solo man that he “can’t get there alone” and “in fact, can’t get very far at all.” I will also refrain from reading ‘What do you think of eating alone?’, a recent piece written by The Korea Times’ senior advisor, Park Moo-jong. There is a spice in that piece. It is from Desmond Morris, English zoologist, ethologist and author of ‘The Naked Ape’: “One may eat alone in the privacy of one’s own home, but to eat alone in a public place is to invite suspicion of personal failure at best and deviancy at worst.” If the president were not my brother, I would have expanded that verdict to accommodate what critics say of him here. I would have said that Nigeria is a public, multi-regional, multi ethnic entity and that no group, no matter how smart, or wise or vicious can kidnap Nigeria and hold it hostage for long. But the president is Yoruba and Muslim like me, so I won’t undermine my brother. I won’t join those who say that even the British who created the country did not succeed in putting it in purdah for as long as they wished.
President Bola Tinubu is a brother to some because he is a Muslim. To some others he is a brother because of the language he speaks — his mother tongue – Yoruba. Still, to some others, he is a brother because of the fraternity of politics he leads. Common to these concentric circle of brotherhoods is the charge that his wrong must not be said from any mouth there. Scores killed in Plateau, 56 murdered in Benue, the Commander-in-Chief is rocking the cities of Paris and London. He must not be accused of playing Nero while his Rome burns. Our brother must never be said to be wrong.
This president campaigned and pledged to renew our hopes in a better Nigeria. Where are the promised “sparkling springs” and the “babbling brooks”? A brother has no right to question his brother, the president. If he is your brother, tell him not that he lives in an illusory world where failure is praiseworthy success and poverty is wealth. The people’s suffering notwithstanding, rejoice with your brother.
A brother is never wrong. Like the anonymous American army major said in the Vietnam war, there is nothing bad to have my brother destroy the town in order to save it. The king can invent his own reality and call us to project it for the world to admire and applaud. We will obey him; he is our brother.
Poverty unravels homes; policies upend businesses. But what is real is unreal because the president is my brother. We hear politicians of various ailments hail the president for making Nigeria great again. Even some opposition governors are rushing into his Noah’s Ark. Reality has different versions. When it is bad as we have it, regime washers create a positive one and command me to praise it. They say we must celebrate their reality because it is done everywhere, even in America where we borrowed this system that sells the freeborn into slavery. If that sounds interesting to you, read ‘Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People’ by Dana D. Nelson. It was published in 2008 long before Donald Trump came with his ideology of alternative truth.
You see them on TV boasting of unprecedented achievements and daring you to contradict them. They did and do it where we copied our constitution. Towards the 2004 presidential election in the US, a Bush administration official with the swag of a conquistador told a New York Times reporter, Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This sounds like what my brother’s government can say in Nigeria. The government is a pack of confidence men. We – you and I – exist to only study, write and talk about what they do.
My brother is dining alone somewhere across the Mediterranean Sea. Some people say he is in Paris, France; some say he is in London, United Kingdom. I am supposed to thank him for eating on my behalf abroad while I yawn at home. As I do that, I should also ask what will end anyone’s ‘eat alone’ regime if they do not change? An Arabian proverb speaks on the consequences of fencing off others from a communal feast. They say he who eats alone vomits alone. They also say he who eats alone chokes alone. The Tigrigna of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia say: He who eats alone dies alone. The NURTW has a more radical version. Its members shout: “Eat alone, Go away!”
China and Nigeria, two continental giants that entered the late 1970s with similar per capita incomes, have since taken opposite economic trajectories. In China, the decisive moment was Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 decision to “open the windows” and let the world’s capital know-how to blow in. In Nigeria, the same decade ushered in the oil boom that encouraged governments to depend on volatile export rents rather than the hard grind of production. Nearly half a century later, the contrast is stark: China ships $3.58 trillion a year worth of merchandise each year to the US, runs the world’s biggest high-speed rail and electricity networks, and has reduced extreme poverty to the low single digits, whereas Nigeria still relies on diesel generators to power most factories and holds the unfortunate record of hosting the planet’s largest pool of people living on less than $3 a day.
I was recently in China as part of a Nigerian business delegation that wanted to revolutionise rail freight. We toured Chinese rail manufacturing factories and saw the cumulative effect firsthand. At Yiwu, a market city once famous only for cheap toys, outbound trains roll directly into the customs yard, clear export formalities in hours and join a trans-Eurasian schedule that reaches Madrid in eighteen days. We counted five layers of the process—terminal handling, port queue, ocean leg, inland haulage, and warehouse sorting—that would each add days and dollars back home. We also noticed that the Chinese yard foreman carried a tablet tracking real-time wagon diagnostics; the Nigerian equivalent would be on a clipboard waiting on a generator to restart the Wi-Fi.
The macro numbers simply crystallise what we observed on the ground. Manufacturing generates roughly twenty-seven per cent of the Chinese GDP and employs more than one hundred million people. In Nigeria, the share by 2024 has slid below ten per cent and continues to fall. Chinese logistics costs average seven to nine per cent of a retail item’s final price; Nigerian goods often surrender a quarter to a third of their value to the road, the checkpoint and the generator. The pertinent question is, what made China succeed and Nigeria fail?
Policy consistency is the first, and perhaps most underrated, source of that divergence. Beijing’s five-year plans differed in detail but never in direction: everyone sought deeper industrialisation, more export capacity, and a higher rung on the technology ladder. By contrast, Lagos, Abuja and the thirty-six state capitals have veered from import substitution to outright deregulation to state-owned “transformation agendas,” each abandoned as soon as the next political cycle arrives or the oil price slumps. For investors deciding where to put a steel mill or a chip assembly plant, the difference between a twenty-year horizon and a four-year horizon is the difference between “build” and “walk away.”
Infrastructure magnified that gap. Beginning in the early 1990s, China poured roughly eight per cent of its GDP every year into roads, ports, airports and—most outstandingly—rail. A lattice of 45,000 kilometres of 250 to 350 km/h track now links almost every provincial capital; freight versions of those lines move 10,000-tonne trains from Chongqing to Shenzhen in a single day. One academic study finds that high-speed rail access lifts a connected city’s GDP by more than fourteen per cent within five years, mostly by slashing logistics times and widening labour catchment areas for firms. Nigeria, meanwhile, rehabilitated a few colonial-era lines and launched several standard gauge projects, but even its showcase Abuja–Kaduna and Lagos- Ibadan routes move fewer passengers in a week than China’s busiest corridor handles before breakfast. Most cargo still crawls along cratered highways where police checkpoints and kidnappers impose an unofficial “fear tax” on every bag of cement or basket of tomatoes.
China achieved rapid growth by heavily investing in manufacturing. This is unlike Nigeria, where manufacturing contributes less than 12.68% in Q2 2024 and more than 8.21% in Q3 2024. China’s investment in High-Speed Rail (HSR) has led to a significant drop in the cost of goods. Recent initiatives like “Made in China 2025” focus on advanced manufacturing sectors such as robotics, aerospace, new-energy vehicles, and biotechnology to increase the value chain and reduce reliance on foreign technology.
Reliable energy is the next Faultline. Guangdong province alone generates more electricity than the entire Nigerian grid, and it does so continuously; Chinese aluminium smelters, textile mills and data centres are designed around the assumption that the power will stay on. Nigerian manufacturers assume the opposite. They buy diesel gensets, pay triple the Asian price for each kilowatt hour they consume, and pass that cost on to consumers—who already face some of the steepest logistics markups in the world. When energy constitutes thirty per cent of a product’s ex-factory price, no patriotic marketing can keep that product competitive abroad.
China’s factories also had people who could keep the machines running. A high school graduate in Jilin can programme a PC and interpret a process control chart because technical and vocational colleges occupy a place of prestige that academic-heavy universities once monopolised. As a result, Chinese employers can field 3,000-strong shifts of technicians able to retool a smartphone assembly line on the weekend. Nigeria’s educational culture remains firmly certificate-oriented; private surveys suggest that more than four-fifths of recent university graduates lack basic spreadsheet or coding competence. The mismatch forces multinationals to fly expatriate engineers into Lagos or—more often—to put the factory in Ethiopia, Vietnam or Guangdong instead.
Automation sharpened the divide still further. In 2024 alone, Chinese firms installed nearly 300,000 industrial robots—more than Europe and the Americas combined. Robots weld car bodies and ship parts, insert smartphone cameras and package frozen dumplings; the technicians who maintain them earn multiples of the average urban wage. Nigeria ordered only a few hundred units that same year, primarily for soft drink bottling plants in Lagos and Ogun. Without automation, productivity plateaus; without productivity, wages stagnate; without rising wages, the domestic market stays too shallow to justify mass production. The cycle feeds on itself.
Oil dependence made everything worse. Crude accounts for well over half of Nigeria’s government revenue but employs fewer than one per cent of its labour force. When Brent prices soar, ministries hire, contractors splurge, and imports surge; when prices crash, capital projects halt, debts pile up, and Naira devaluations wipe out household purchasing power. Chinese planners did court commodity cycles—the country still consumes half the world’s copper and iron ore—but their fiscal lifeline was value-added, not raw rents. Tax receipts rose in tandem with factory output, giving Beijing a steadily expanding pool of local currency resources to finance the next port or rail line.
Insecurity compounds Nigeria’s structural costs. Hundreds of lives and thousands of work hours vanish each year due to armed robbery, terrorist attacks or kidnaping along the Lagos–Kano highway. Firms pay for private guards, convoy fees and kidnap insurance; those outlays translate directly into higher shelf prices and lower margins. China indeed grapples with crime and corruption, but industrial zones in Shenzhen or Suzhou are patrolled, litigated and powered in ways that let a container leave the factory gate and reach the port with minimal friction or added cost. Logistics is the key enabler of manufacturing.
Yet none of these gaps is destiny. Nigeria’s poverty is a product of a mix of bad leadership and bad choices. Nigeria’s heavy reliance on oil causes economic vulnerability. Nigeria’s education system emphasises certificates over practical skills, creating a gap between what is taught in schools and what employers need. Over 85% of Nigerian graduates lack digital skills, making them less competitive in the job market. The SMART schools championed by the Enugu State government aim to start closing the IT gaps, and other states in Nigeria are expected to create more of these schools.
Nigeria still has an unreliable electricity supply, inconsistent fiscal policies, shifting regulations, and excessive bureaucracy. Years of focus on ease of doing business have improved things, but we are far from average. Nigeria’s service-led growth has benefited the educated middle class and corrupt government officials and is less employment-intensive. Despite having a young population, massive arable land and growth potential, Nigeria has remained a country of poor people.
Nigeria still possesses assets China would envy: a median age under twenty, vast swathes of uncultivated arable land, abundant sunshine for solar power and a coastline perched between the Atlantic trade lanes and Africa’s interior. What it lacks is the deliberate sequencing that China pursued. Reliable baseload power and a north-south freight rail spine must precede, not follow, any talk of mega parks or local content mandates. Technical colleges must receive the same prestige and funding as universities. We applaud the efforts of the Minister of Education in creating and masterminding the technical and vocational school strategy. Special Economic Zones must specialise in textiles in Kano, agro-processing in Benue, and light engineering in Aba so suppliers and toolmakers can cluster rather than scatter. Nigeria must adopt Industrial clusters as a potential strategy. Industrialisation breeds employment, alleviates poverty, and creates high income and GDP growth, which creates wealth and a better quality of life for citizens.
If those choices are made and sustained, the virtuous cycle that lifted China is also ready to spin in Nigeria: hard infrastructure lowers cost, factories sprout, wages rise, domestic demand deepens, tax receipts multiply, and the next round of infrastructure becomes easier to finance. History shows that such cycles do not begin with genius inventions or windfall resources; they start when governments decide that electricity at midnight and freight trains at dawn are more important than oil rents at noon. China made that decision decades ago and grew rich. Nigeria still can. President Widodo of Indonesia grew their economy within ten years by furthering an export-oriented strategy with in-country value addition, embarking on expansive infrastructure development, reducing poverty to 1%, and almost doubling per capita income. Can we do this in Nigeria? Yes, we can! Today’s dismal rankings will look like a brief preface to a more prosperous chapter
Adelabu Adegoke was one of the most flamboyant and charismatic politicians in pre-independence Nigeria. When one day, the press asked him about deliberations in the Western Region House of Assembly, he replied that it was a “peculiar mess”. He pronounced the words with a Yoruba intonation making the two words sound like “Penkelemesi”. So, his sobriquet became Penkelemesi.
Today, his grandson, Adebayo Adelabu, is the Minister of Power who rather than do the job he is paid for, prefers serving Nigerians peculiar mess as menu. Under his watch, the national grid in 2024 on average, collapsed monthly and, power supply remains epileptic while tariff is astronomically increased. In other words, Nigerians under him pay astronomical electricity tariff for the darkness supplied.
However, rather than be quiet, Adelabu insults Nigerians at per second billing. For those who may not be aware, Nigerians as customers buy everything in the hope of being supplied electricity. We buy all: from wires, poles, transformers to meters with which we are billed. Despite these, Adelabu adds to the injury with insults and loads of Trump-like alternative truths. For instance, in April, 2024, Adelabu needed to astronomically increase electricity tariff in line with the biddings of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the World Bank who falsely claim that the cost of electricity is too cheap in Nigeria.
So, the grandson of Penkele spins a tail in which he blames and insults Nigerians for the epileptic power supply and why they had to be punished with high tariff increases. He said: “A lot of people will come back from work, they want to have dinner, or they want to see their colleagues down the road, they switch on the AC for the room to be cooling before they come back. Some people will be going to work in the morning, a freezer that you left on for days, they will still leave it on when all the items in the freezer are frozen and five, six, eight hours of their absence will not make it to defreeze, they will still leave it to be consuming power just because we are not paying enough.”
In his 2024 Independence Day message which also marked his one year in office, the Minister told Nigerians that over 40 per cent of us are enjoying 20 hours of electricity daily. The truth is that while some Nigerians have less than four hours of electricity supply daily, many have less. There are actually towns that were not supplied electricity at all within that period. In fact, as at April 18, 2025 areas in Kaduna metropolis like Romi and Sabo, for weeks, have had less than two hours power supply daily!
In any case, where did the increase in power distribution come from when for decades our maximum power distribution capacity remains 4,000 megawatts? Nigerians knew Adelabu was lying because that was not the reality of their existence. Also, Adelabu knew he was lying because as the Yorubas say, two persons cannot be deceived simultaneously; if the person being deceived does not know, the deceiver knows what game he is playing. However, Nigerians were too hungry to be bothered about debunking such optics by a man belching at the nation’s table. This spin by Adelabu on hours of power supplied is not original. It is an old template in the files of the Power Ministry. It was used on June 9, 2020 by one of his predecessors, Mamman Kwagyang Saleh, who on June 9, 2020 on the Nigerian Television Authority, claimed Nigerians were enjoying 18-24 hours of power supply every day.
Adelabu had also tried to play on the intelligence of Nigerians. While not increasing power distribution above the 4,000MW we have had for over a decade, he categorised consumers into what he classified as Band A, B, C. Under this false categorisation, he billed those in Band B, N63 per kilowatt-hour and those in Band A N209 per kilowatt-hour. After achieving the tariff increase, the Ministry decided to “regularise electricity tariffs” which is an euphemism for tariff increase and obliteration of the deceptive ‘Band’ system.
In his latest outing on April 17, 2025, Adelabu held a long, sonorous press briefing with no verifiable statistics to back his claims. He told Nigerians: “We have increased our generation to 6,003 megawatts, up by 1,700 megawatts in one and a half years since President Tinubu assumed office. It took Nigeria over 40 years to achieve an incremental 2,000 megawatts of average energy; we achieved this in less than two years.”
The claim by Adelabu that it is the Tinubu government that has increased power generation to 6,003MW is contradicted by facts from the supervisory Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC. In its “Daily Energy Watch” for January 28, 2015, the agency stated that power generation was 6,421 MW. In January, 2017, Buhari’s Minister of Power Babatunde Fashola announced a power generating capacity of 7,000MW. When Fashola in his Monday, July 9, 2018 press briefing made similar claims as an indication of progress, the eleven distribution companies under their Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors, ANED, issued a statement accusing the government of lying as the country had almost hit that mark before Buhari came to power on May 29, 2015.
So, Minister Adelabu’s claims ten years later, that due to hard work the Tinubu administration had significantly increased power generation to 6,003 MW, cannot but be a fallacy. Generally, contrary to the claims of Adelabu, our power sector is in a sorry state and urgent steps need to be taken. One of them is the overdue review of the demonstrably fraudulent 2013 privatisation which handed over the sector to mainly incompetent distribution companies some of which have gone bankrupt. The review has statutorily been due since 2018.
If need be, the privatisation should be reversed. The Dominican Republic did so in 2003, the German cities of Berlin and Hamburg also did, and California with a $3 trillion economy equally did. This led to the liquidation of Enron on July 16, 2005. Nigeria which began to generate and distribute electricity in 1896, has one of the best experiences in the world. Along with public power supply, we also had an independent or private power company called Nasco which was established in 1925. The latter was quite efficient and reliable. But the Federal Government smashed Nasco on the basis that no company should compete with NEPA/PHCN. Along with the reversal of the privatisation swindle, the Nasco model remains a viable one. Anybody interested in further reading can pick a copy of the 2020 book: “The light in the tunnel may be an oncoming train: A Research on Privatisation in Nigeria focusing on electricity”, which I co-authored with Ahmed Aminu Yusuf.
Two boys were playing together in the garden. Soon, the play degenerated into an argument, and they engaged in a shouting match. From afar, the father of the boys cautioned them to stop arguing and continue their play, but they wouldn’t budge. Shortly after, they lunged at each other and almost engaged in fisticuffs. The father, at this point, wades in. He ordered one of the boys, his step-son, to go to the naughty corner and face the wall for six minutes while he told the other boy, his biological son, to continue his play in the garden.
The above scenario aptly captures the developments in Rivers state. President Bola Tinubu on March 18 2025, declared a six-month emergency rule in the state, following the political crisis that pitched the state governor, Siminalayi Fubara, against the FCT minister, Nyesom Wike, on one hand and the state house of assembly on the other.
The disagreement was primarily between Wike, the immediate past Rivers state governor, and Fubara, one of his long-standing allies whom he installed as his successor. Wike’s angst was that he might lose his political status in Rivers as Fubara was allegedly trying to bring down the structures that helped him to become governor. After almost two years of unending strife without any headway, President Tinubu, as the father of the nation, decided to wield the big stick by suspending Fubara and his deputy for six months. He also suspended the members of the Rivers assembly, but every right-discerning person knows they are not the major gladiator in the battle, just a pawn in the game. He left Wike to continue his job in his cabinet.
Of course, the president’s action has elicited mixed reactions from Nigerians. While some have argued that based on the provisions of sections 1(2), 14(1)(c), 176(1) (2) and 305(1) of the 1999 Constitution, the suspension of democratically elected officials in Rivers state is unlawful and unconstitutional, others have justified the suspension, saying no responsible government will fold its hands and allow Rivers State, a major economic lifeline of the country to go up in flames.
However, the majority of Nigerians share the view that to be fair, the president should have also suspended Wike, who is a major player in the crisis rocking the state. This would have made him sober and take a deep introspection over the issues at stake. But that is not to be the case, as Fubara’s temporary displacement seems to have given Wike the feeling that he has the upper hand. He has been granting interviews with his characteristic bumptiousness while Fubara is at home licking his wounds and brooding over the incident.
In the latest media parley he had with some select journalists, Wike even expressed dissatisfaction with the presidential declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State and suspension of the governor, saying what he wanted was outright removal.
Hear him: “As a politician, I am not happy with the declaration of Emergency Rule in Rivers state. I wanted the outright removal of the governor. But for the interest of the state, the president did the right thing to prevent anarchy in the state. The matter is in court, but people must say the truth. The governor was gone. It is not on my place to make it good for the governor. As a politician, my business is not to make him comfortable and that is why there is power plane.”
Wike’s remarks are grossly unacceptable, a direct affront to the president, and one would have expected the presidency to call him to order, telling him to face the task assigned to him in the FCT. Whether his intervention is constitutional or not, the president has acted in what he considers the best interest of Rivers. Fubara, who was at the receiving end, has quietly accepted his fate, but Wike continues to talk garrulously and pour petrol on fire. His comments, if left unchecked, can infuriate the supporters of Fubara, many of whom have been made redundant by the sole administrator, Ibok-Ette Ibas, who appears to be pursuing an ‘obliterate anything Fubara’ agenda.
Wike was even seen in a video last week in London, where he hosted the suspended lawmakers. Of course, that is one of the consequences of his not being suspended. In the recent media parley, he even said he is ready to forgive Fubara if he apologises to him. Except if he truly knows from within his heart that he wronged Wike, but if not, I think it will be very idiotic for Fubara to offer any apology at this point. If his fight with Wike is not because of any breach of agreement (Ngige-Chris Uba saga), if it is for the interest of the good people of Rivers state, then any apology from him will amount to utter wimpishness.
I am not in support of Fubara. He keeps creating an impression of a flawless ‘Sim’ple man, but that appears to be a mere facade. In fact, I was alarmed last week when I read reports that he donated the sum of N300 million to the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) to hold a conference in Rivers State. Only God knows how much of Rivers’ resources he has donated so far, yet he created the impression of a man who places a premium on frugality and is judiciously using taxpayers’ money. Nobody would have known this if not for his suspension from office and the fact that the NBA moved the conference away from Rivers state, which prompted the sole administrator to ask for a refund.
What, however, impresses me about Fubara is the maturity and dignified silence he has maintained since his suspension. One inciting word from him to his supporters could have set the state on fire. He has, however, remained silent, allowing Nigerians, especially Rivers women, to fight the battle on his behalf. That is quite commendable, and his silence shouldn’t be taken as a sign of weakness.
On the other hand, Wike too should have a sober reflection. The current face-off between him and Fubara, is it karma at work? The law of karma states that your deeds and actions, whether good or bad, will eventually return to you. I read an old news item recently where former governor of Rivers state, Rotimi Amaechi, was more or less lamenting his recommendation of Wike, who was his former chief of staff, to be a minister.
Amaechi while addressing clergymen of the Niger Delta Bishops’ Forum who visited him in Government House, Port Harcourt in August 2013 said: “I hear you also visited Nyesom Wike. I try not to talk about Wike. I say so because he is my subordinate, I try not to talk about him but I hear you visited him. Why I won’t talk about him is that Nyesom Wike, his second tenure as Obio Akpor council chairman was by the grace of God, but I was the architect of that second term. Nyesom Wike was appointed chief of staff by me. Nyesom Wike, as a minister of state, I nominated him. I was under pressure from the president to drop him, but I refused. The president persuaded me to drop him and bring a woman, but I refused. I hear he is going all over town saying I didn’t appoint him. I didn’t appoint him, the president appointed him, but I nominated him to be a minister as the chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. I did, but you know, character doesn’t come easily, character is a very difficult thing, and I am a man of character.”
In writing this article, I sought the opinion of a senior lawyer on why the president didn’t suspend Wike. Though he chose to remain anonymous, he said: “It will appear that the president has taken a side in the Rivers crisis. Much as he tries to put up a face, it is very evident that he has leaned in the direction of Wike. For a balance of the situation, something should have been done to Wike to show a kind of fairness, but the presidency does not see it that way. Their view is that if Wike was suspended, it will seem like a punishment.
“They believed that the suspension of democratically elected institutions in Rivers is not seen as a suspension but as a temporary solution to the crisis. According to them, the governor would have been impeached and the crisis would have escalated, but by suspending him, the president has saved him from impeachment. However, that argument does not gel with the average Nigerian who thinks that Wike, being a major player in the crisis, would have also been awarded a penalty.”
In conclusion, there are pertinent questions to ask, which are very germane to the Rivers crisis. Will the president’s intervention bring a permanent solution to the crisis in the state? After the six-month suspension is over, what next? With no peace-making efforts in sight, will the president extend the suspension, thereby technically keeping Fubara out of office till almost the end of his tenure?
With Wike still firing from all cylinders and saying he wants an outright removal of Fubara, will that improve or worsen an already bad situation? Eleven PDP governors are challenging Fubara’s suspension in court; if they triumph, will the president respect the court order and terminate the reign of the sole administrator?
What happens if, after six months, the president restores Fubara to his position and the lawmakers loyal to Wike still go ahead and impeach him?
Akinsuyi, former group politics editor of Daily Independent, currently studies sustainability communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
On the evening of 5 April 2012, the prime-time bulletin on the television news of the Malawi Broacasting Corporation (MBC), announced to the country that the president, Ngwazi Professor Bingu wa Mutharika, “had been taken ill and had been flown to South Africa for specialist treatment.” At another end of the capital city, Lilongwe, a presidential convoy was on its way to the Kamuzu International Airport (KIA) where an air ambulance awaited with instructions to fly to South Africa a president who was supposedly alive but unwell.
Earlier in the day, around 11:00 in the morning, Ngwazi Professor Bingu had collapsed while receiving in audience the Member of Parliament representing the south-east constituency of the capital city, Lilongwe, Agnes Penemulungu. The judicial commission of inquiry which later investigated what transpired thereafter received evidence which showed quite clearly that the presidential court had not prepared nor practiced for the possibility of a life-and-death emergency involving the president. Elton Singini, a senior judge, chaired the inquiry.
The commission of inquiry established as a fact that the president died earlier in the day inside the ambulance en route to Kamuzu Central Hospital in the capital city. According to the inquiry report, “the President was brought in dead (BID) at Kamuzu Central Hospital [KCH] at around 11.25 in the morning” of 5 April.
At the time of the news bulletin announcing that he was to be flown to South Africa later on the same day, President Bingu had been dead for over eight hours. Despite being aware of this, the presidential retinue instructed staff at the hospital to apply cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the presidential remains for over two hours. In the process, they crushed his rib-cage.
More was to follow. At the airport, the air ambulance pilots from South Africa declined to board the body, citing the fact that their permission was to fly with a patient not a dead body. High level conversations ensued between Lilongwe and Pretoria. It may have helped and was certainly relevant that Malawi’s Foreign Minister at the time was Peter Mutharika, President Bingu’s younger brother who was also intent on stepping into the shoes of his just deceased brother. Peter needed time to set the wheels in motion to leap-frog Vice-President, Joyce Banda in the succession stakes.
South Africa’s President, Jacob Zuma who had retired for the day had to be woken up to personally authorize the flight. Shortly after mid-night on 6 April 2012, the air ambulance took off for South Africa. In Malawi, the people were told their president was headed to South Africa for medical attention. In South Africa, the authorities knew that the air ambulance on its way from Lilongwe would arrive with the dead body of Malawi’s president. Shortly after 02:30 on 6 April, the aircraft landed at South Africa’s National Defence Force (SANDF) Waterkloof Airbase on the outskirts of Pretoria. From there, it was transferred to a mortuary.
The authors of all this malign chicanery designed to deceive the people of Malawi, however, forgot to also notify the processes of bio-chemistry. By the time the body arrived the morgue in South Africa, it had been “in the open without refrigeration for about 18 hours after death.” As a result, the very important and high profile invitees to the state funeral of President Bingu which took place on 23 April, 2012, had to endure the uncomfortable company of flies, as well as the majestic fragrance of human of putrefaction. As the report of the Justice Elton Singini Commission of Inquiry recorded, “the body had started decomposing as evidenced by the smell and a few flies hovering around.”
Four years earlier, in August 2008, Levy Mwanawasa, the president of neighbouring Zambia, died in a military hospital near Paris in France. While attending the summit of the African Union in Cairo, Egypt, on 29 June 2008, President Mwanawasa had collapsed following what was later understood to be an aneurysm (Stroke). He was stabilized there before being transferred to France where he died two months later. At his death, it came out that two years earlier, during his first term as president in 2006, President Mwanawasa had suffered an earlier stroke.
For that, he received extended treatment in the United Kingdom. No one told Zambians.
The year after the death of President Mwanawasa, in June 2009, Omar Bongo, who had ruled Gabon for 41years died in hospital in Spain. When he left Libreville at the beginning of the previous month, his compatriots believed that their president, the doyen and favorite of France Afrique, was away on a working visit – a phrase all too familiar to Nigerians – to his favorite haunts in Europe. At his death, it emerged that more than one month before his death, President Bongo had been hospitalized for cancer treatment in Spain.
President Bongo was not the last long-serving African president to die in Spain. On 8 July 2022, former Angolan president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, died also there after prolonged cancer treatment. Following his death, a family crisis broke out over his funeral, which delayed the repatriation of his remains to Luanda for more than one month. Six weeks after his death, in the third week of August 2022, a judge in Spain finally authorized the return of the body of President dos Santos to Angola for burial.
When he departed Nigeria on 2 April, the presidency in Abuja issued a statement claiming that Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s president, was off to France on a “short working visit”, during which he would “retreat to review the progress of ongoing reforms and engage in strategic planning ahead of his administration’s second anniversary.” They barely stopped short of telling Nigerians that their president was headed to Lourdes for the grace of its historic apparitions. President Tinubu is a Muslim; it was in the middle of the Christian season of Lent and no one had apparently bothered to advise him or his image makers that it is usually Christians who undertake two week-long retreats in the middle of this season.
The day after the end of the initially announced 14 days, the same presidential retinue disclosed that the president had relocated from France to the United Kingdom, from where he was doing an excellent job as Nigeria’s president in Europe.
The evidence seems inescapable that President Tinubu has significant health challenges and needs regular medical attention from doctors overseas. For this, his destination of choice is clearly France. In 22 months as president, Tinubu has made at least eight trips to the country under different guises for a cumulative period of over 60 days.
While that he’s been away this time, hundreds – if not more – had been killed in massacres in different parts of Nigeria. As president, Tinubu is also the Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s armed and security forces. Yet, from Europe, he is reported to be passing the buck to state governors to do that which only he has the tools to accomplish under Nigeria’s constitution.
Excluding the five years and three months of the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan from February 2010 to May 2015, Nigeria has had a presidency in near-permanent occupancy of sanatoriums overseas for 15 years. The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), which Tinubu led, was aggressively voluble in asking for candour on the health status of a terminally ill President Umaru Yar’Adua.
After going into marriage with Muhammadu Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) to create All Progressives Congress (APC), they made virtue of unlooking when Buhari took up residence in foreign hospitals for much of his presidency.
It should be no news that a man of President Tinubu’s age is unwell. Those invested in concealing that reality from Nigerians are more interested in protecting their present perquisites than in the wellbeing of their principal or of the country.
The presidency is more than just an office. For those around the occupant of the office, it also means money, power, and privilege. To preserve it, most people in and around the presidency take liberties, sometimes, even with the wellbeing of their principal or with accountability to the people in whose name he holds office. For the country and even for the president, the wages of this interminable subterfuge are prohibitive.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
In a recent media outburst, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mr. Nyesom Wike taunted me for losing a case which he had won at the Supreme Court. Even though, I appear regularly in domestic and regional courts in Africa, Mr. Wike dubbed me "a television lawyer".
I did not join issues with him on that occasion because Mr. Wike is the only life bencher in Nigeria who has never handled a case in any trial court or appellate court. Another reason for ignoring Mr. Wike's vituperations is that it is no crime if a lawyer loses a case in any court. In other words, only a corrupt lawyer wins all cases in all courts.
A couple of days ago, Mr. Wike subjected me to another scurrilous attack in a press conference held in Abuja to showcase the Ministry of Federal Capital Territory. In the course of the press conference, he veered off and was alleged to have accused me lying about the defection status of certain legislators during an appearance on Channels TV.
While referring to a recent Supreme Court ruling that addressed the issue of defection, stating, “A few days ago, the Supreme Court settled this matter of defection." He then said that, "If someone of Femi Falana’s caliber can go on national television and lie, it’s very serious. Lies can cause a lot of crises. He expressed concern that such misinformation, especially from a respected legal figure, could escalate tensions if not addressed."
Specifically, Mr. Wike accused me of lying against the Supreme Court over its decision on the defection of 27 members of the Rivers State House of Assembly. Contrary to Mr. Wike's assertion, I did not lie against the Supreme Court in respect of the judgment in question. All I said was that the matter of the defection of the 27 legislators was raised _suo_ _motu_ and determined by the eminent Justices of the apex court.
My comment was based on the undeniable fact that the vexed issue of the defection of the 27 legislators was pending in the Port Harcourt judicial division of the Federal High Court at the material time. In addition, there are video tapes and a sworn affidavit where the 27 legislators had confirmed their defection from the People's Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressive Congress.
It is public knowledge that Mr. Wike had praised the Supreme Court to high heavens and held a thanksgiving service to celebrate the decision on the defection of the 27 legislators. However, he decided to attack me for commenting on the same judgment without any legal justification.
I wish to state, without any fear of contradictions, that my fundamental right to criticise the decisions of courts is guaranteed by Section 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended and article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights.
I would have ignored the minister's latest gratuitous attack but for the fact that he had recently called on the Body of Benchers to discipline lawyers who have the temerity to criticise the judgments of Nigerian courts.
However, unlike Mr. Wike who calls judges names whenever they disagree with his politics of opportunism, I have always criticised the judgments of domestic and regional courts with utmost decorum and in good faith.
While Mr. Wike believes that it is a professional anomaly to criticise the decisions of Judges, the Supreme Court of Nigeria has always welcomed the criticism and review of its judgments because the Justices believe that they are prone to make mistakes like all mortals. It is undoubtedly clear that Mr. Wike is not familiar with the case of Adegoke Motors Limited v Dr. Babatunde Adesanya 2 1989 3 NWLR (Pt 109) 250 at 274 where Oputa JSC of blessed memory said that, "We are final not because we are infallible; rather we are infallible because we are final”.
About five years ago, the then Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad said to lawyers, “As critical stakeholders in the task of justice delivery, you have the responsibility of drawing our attention to where things are going wrong or on the verge of going wrong." Justice Muhammad further stated that It would not be out of place for lawyers to subject Justices in the country to criticism where necessary as a step to ensuring improvement in the justice delivery system.
From time to time, many respected Justices commend my criticism of the judgments of courts and the defence of the Judiciary. It is on record that at a recent valedictory service held in Abuja, a retiring Justice of the Supreme Court referred to one of my critical comments pertaining to the Nigerian Judiciary.
In the light of the foregoing, Mr. Wike delibetately set out to incite the Supreme Court against me as the allegation levelled against me by him is spurious and tendencious in every material particular. Since he has become the unsolicited defender of the Judiciary, I challenge him to report me to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee for professional misconduct.
No doubt, the minister's latest gratuitous attack but for the fact that he had recently called on the Body of Benchers to discipline lawyers who have the temerity to criticise the judgments of Nigerian courts.
However, unlike Mr. Wike who calls judges names whenever they disagree with his politics of opportunism, I have always criticised the judgments of domestic and regional courts with utmost decorum and in good faith.
No doubt, the decision of the Supreme Court is final on defection of legislators from the political party that sponsored them to another political party. In their wisdom, their Lordships said that defection can only be proved with the production of the register of members of political parties. My fear is that this decision will be waived by unpatriotic politicians to justify political prostitution in Nigeria.
In the interest of political stability and national morality, I have respectively called on the Supreme Court to continue to rely on
the cases of the Attorney-General of the Federation ?. Abubakar (2007) 10 NWLR (PT.1041) 1 at 178, Dapialong v Dariye (2007) 8 NWLR (Pt 1036) 332 and Abegunde ?. Ondo State House of Assembly & Ors (2015) LPELR-24588(SC) where it had been held that the consequence of a defection by a legislator is the automatic loss of his or her seat in the legislative house.
While Mr. Wike believes that it is a professional misconduct to criticise the decisions of Judges, the Supreme Court of Nigeria has always welcomed the criticism and review of its judgments because the Justices believe that they are prone to make mistakes like all mortals. It is undoubtedly clear that Mr. Wike is not familiar with the case of Adegoke Motors Limited v Dr. Babatunde Adesanya 2 1989 3 NWLR (Pt 109) 250 at 274 where Oputa JSC of blessed memory said that, "We are final not because we are infallible; rather we are infallible because we are final”.
About five years ago, the then Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad said to lawyers, “As critical stakeholders in the task of justice delivery, you have the responsibility of drawing our attention to where things are going wrong or on the verge of going wrong." Justice Muhammad further stated that It would not be out of place for lawyers to subject Justices in the country to criticism where necessary as a step to ensuring improvement in the justice delivery system.
It may interest Mr. Wike to know that from time to time, many respected Justices commend my criticism of the judgments of Nigerian courts and the defence of the Judiciary. It is on record that at a recent valedictory service held in Abuja, a retiring Justice of the Supreme Court quoted with approval one of my critical comments pertaining to the Nigerian Judiciary.
In the light of the foregoing, it is indubitably clear that the allegation levelled against me by Mr. Wike is spurious and tendencious in every material particular. To that extent, he
has failed in his desperate bid to incite the Justices of the Supreme Court against me without any basis whatsoever. However, it is high time that Mr. Wike was prevented from further parading himself as the unsolicited defender of the Nigerian judiciary.
More...
[OPINION] Greed, Gullibility, And Get-Rich-Quick: Nigeria’s Endless Ponzi Nightmare - Isaac Asabor
AdminThere is a dangerous triad that has held many Nigerians hostage for decades, and it consists of greed, gullibility, and the relentless hunger for get-rich-quick schemes. This unholy trinity has birthed a cycle of scams so vicious that even after national heartbreaks like the collapse of MMM, thousands continue to fall victim to financial wolves dressed as investment messiahs.
The script has not changed. The actors keep rotating. Yet, the Nigerian public keeps walking into the same trap. The tragedy? They walk in willingly, eyes wide open, wallets even wider.
For those who may have forgotten, MMM was a Russian Ponzi scheme introduced into Nigeria around 2015. It promised a 30% monthly return. That is right, 30% return on investment in 30 days, with no verifiable product, no service, no business model, just a fancy website and testimonies from early beneficiaries.
Despite repeated warnings from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and financial experts across the country, Nigerians poured in their life savings. Some sold land. Some borrowed money to “invest.” Others dragged family and friends into the scheme like modern-day evangelists. The result? A collective national financial collapse in December 2016 when MMM shut down and vanished.
Like an open wound left untreated, the vacuum MMM created was soon filled with other schemes that cut across Ultimate Cycler, Loom, Naira Wealth, Racksterli, Chinmark Group, MBA Forex, and several others. Each came cloaked in new branding, fresh buzzwords, social media glitz, and increasingly sophisticated lies. Not only that, the tactics remain eerily consistent with promise of insane returns, creation of artificial scarcity or urgency, recruitment of social media influencers and local ambassadors. Other baits adopted by the scammers include use of early payouts to seduce more victims.
Against the foregoing backdrop, it is not an exaggeration to opine that having successfully baited some greedy and gullible Nigerians into the Ponzi scheme, they would vanish into thin air, sometimes after issuing a well-crafted press release blaming “economic challenges, “and somehow, Nigerians keep falling for it.
At this juncture, it tempting to ask, “Why do we keep getting burnt?” To answer the foregoing question, let us call it what it is: a toxic mix of greed and gullibility. Many Nigerians, facing legitimate economic hardship, have grown impatient with the slow route to financial stability, they do not want to invest for the long haul; they want money to rain down in weeks, and so, in their desperation, they suspend logic.
Consider this: If a scheme offers you 50% returns in one month, what legitimate business in the world can sustain that? Oil and gas? Real estate? Forex? None. Not without massive risks or fraud. But greed blinds people to basic arithmetic. And gullibility finishes the job.
In a society that idolizes wealth over process, people would rather look rich than understand money. That is why social media has become a breeding ground for scammers. All it takes is a few carefully crafted testimonies, a slick logo, and a few Instagram celebrities calling it the “next big thing.” Boom, the Ponzi fever spreads like wildfire.
We must spotlight the growing complicity of social media influencers. Many of them promote these fraudulent ventures either out of ignorance or pure selfish gain. They flaunt screenshots of returns, record videos talking about “God’s blessing through this opportunity,” and mislead thousands.
In fact, it will be recalled in this context that the SEC has recently warned influencers and celebrities against promoting unregistered financial products, especially digital asset platforms and meme coins, citing the new Investments and Securities Act 2025. The law mandates registration, transparency, and SEC approval for such promotions. Influencers must verify clients are licensed, use clear language, and label ads as sponsored. Violations attract fines up to ₦10 million, three years in prison, or both. The House of Representatives also cautioned public figures, stressing legal liabilities for misleading endorsements. The SEC aims to protect Nigerians from deceptive schemes often masked as entertainment or investment opportunities.
It is even more surprising that when the scheme crashes, celebrities and influencers who served as promoters of the scam go mute. No apologies. No accountability. Just a pivot to the next lifestyle brand. The authorities must begin to hold them responsible as co-enablers of financial fraud.
While the CBN and EFCC issue periodic warnings, their approach remains mostly reactive. By the time regulators announce an investigation, the scam has already milked thousands of victims dry. The SEC must move beyond issuing circulars, it must deploy intelligence tools to track, flag, and blacklist these fraudulent ventures before they go viral.
A central warning database listing suspicious schemes, names of promoters, and their bank details would be a great start. Collaborations with Fintech platforms and payment gateways could also disrupt these scams before they grow legs.
One of the most alarming developments in recent times is the growing number of Ponzi schemes being promoted from religious pulpits. Unscrupulous individuals now infiltrate churches and mosques, using God’s name to push lies. They offer testimonies. Some even deceive pastors into endorsing them. In a community driven by faith and trust, such endorsements are gold.
But when the crash comes, the betrayal cuts deeper. Not only are pockets emptied, trust in institutions is shattered. Religious leaders must wake up. You are not investment advisors. If your church or mosque becomes a tool for financial fraud, you are not just spiritually reckless, you are complicit in crime.
While it is easy to pity the victims of Ponzi schemes, we must start asking tough questions. How many people ask for business plans before investing? How many insist on company registration documents, audited financials, or even physical office addresses?
Too many people throw money into schemes because “someone in my estate has collected his payout” or “my church member just bought a car.” That is not investment that is herd mentality.
At what point do we stop being victims and start being willing participants in our own financial destruction?
At this juncture, it is expedient to ask, “What Must Change?” regarding the issue of Ponzi scheme gone sour. To answer the foregoing question, it should be borne at the back of the mind of everyone that if Nigeria is to break this cycle, we must attack the root causes, and the first step would entail embarking on an aggressive financial education. This can be achieved by introducing mandatory financial literacy into school curriculums. Let children understand compound interest, risk, and scams before they leave secondary school. Adults must also have access to financial education through TV, radio, community centers, and local governments.
Secondly, naming and shaming should be adopted against scammers. Let us have a public, government-backed blacklist of Ponzi schemes and their operators. Through this, names of scammers can be published with their accounts frozen and their assets seized. This would no doubt make examples of them.
Another steps to be taken in nipping the tide of Ponzi scheme in the bud is by holding influencers involved in the promotion of any given scheme accountable. In fact, influencers promoting investment scams should be sanctioned, fined, and in some cases, prosecuted. Enough of the “I didn’t know” excuse.
In fact, there is an urgent need for our national values to be rewritten. Nigeria must stop celebrating wealth without context. We glorify “big boys” with no verifiable sources of income, yet scorn those building businesses the right way. This must change. We need a new narrative, one that applauds how the money was made, not just that it was made.
In a similar vein, whistleblowing must, more than ever before, be encouraged. This can be achieved by government agencies through the setting up of anonymous hotlines and rewards for whistleblowers who alert authorities early about suspicious schemes.
Nigerians must accept that the enemy is not just the scammer, it is also the unwillingness to learn from past mistakes. No matter how difficult the economy gets, there is no justification for voluntarily funding your own downfall.
Any scheme that promises to multiply your money without a clear, legal, and sustainable business model is a fraud. Always has been. Always will be.
If we do not collectively wake up, we will continue to ask the same painful question every year, “How did we fall for this again?”
[OPINION] Nsulu Airport Land Reduction: A Plea For Justice, Transparency, And Community Survival - Roland Ogbonnaya
Admin
The proposed Abia International Airport in Nsulu, Isiala Ngwa North, holds the potential for economic growth and connectivity in our state. As landowners, we recognise and value the potential benefits that such a project could provide. We are not against development. We welcome progress. However, the current approach to land acquisition for this project is deeply flawed, lacking transparency, and jeopardises the very fabric of our community. The Landowners feel compelled to speak out in protest and demand a just and equitable resolution that protects our rights and our future.
The initial euphoria over the airport project has given way to anxiety and distrust. What should have been a time of great joy and excitement has instead become a breeding ground for resentment, fueled by a lack of transparency, alleged inducements, and a disregard for established legal procedures. The proposed acquisition of a staggering 1025 hectares of land, effectively displacing countless families and livelihoods, is completely unacceptable. This is a land grab disguised as development.
Our primary concern is not obstructing progress, but rather ensuring our survival. We are not asking for the project to be abandoned; rather, we want it scaled back to a manageable and sustainable level. We propose that the land acquisition area be reduced to 400 hectares. This would allow the airport to be built while also ensuring that our community has enough land to farm, feed itself, and preserve our way of life. This is not an unreasonable request; it is a plea for our continued existence.
The current government approach, marked by secrecy and a lack of meaningful consultation, is deeply concerning. Instead of engaging in open and honest dialogue with the community, the government is accused of using underhanded tactics, such as sneaking around villages, harassing landowners, and offering pitiful sums - "peanuts," as we have been told - to persuade them to give up their land. This is not the way a responsible government should treat its people. It is a betrayal of trust and a violation of our basic rights.
We are particularly concerned about the alleged use of party agents and compromised villagers to advance the government's agenda. These individuals, often motivated by personal gain or political expediency, coerce vulnerable and often illiterate landowners into signing away their land for a pittance, without fully understanding the long-term implications. This is not development; it is exploitation.
Governor Alex Otti's administration has a unique opportunity to right the wrongs of the past and forge a new path forward, one based on trust, transparency, and community rights. We urge the Governor to personally intervene and ensure that this project is carried out in a fair and equitable manner, in accordance with international best practices and applicable laws.
The Land Use Act of 1978 governs the process of land acquisition in Nigeria, vesting all land in each state with the Governor of that state. While the Act establishes a framework for land acquisition, implementation is frequently fraught with difficulties, such as corruption, a lack of transparency, and a disregard for community rights. We believe that the current process in Nsulu falls far short of the idealised and comprehensive procedure outlined in the law.
Consider the government's processes to acquire community lands for projects in Nigeria.
- Project Identification and Planning Phase:
How thoroughly were potential environmental and community impacts evaluated during the early stages of project conception and feasibility studies? Were environmental impact assessments conducted transparently and with the participation of local communities? Were the initial consultations truly informative and inclusive, or were they merely formalities meant to stamp a predetermined outcome? It appears that the affected communities were not taken seriously during the pre-acquisition phase.
- Land Acquisition Phase:
The official notification and declaration of the intention to acquire land should have been a watershed moment, demonstrating the government's commitment to transparency and fairness. But was the notice promptly served on all recognised community leaders, landowners, and occupants? Was the notice published in the state's Official Gazette as well as widely circulated newspapers, ensuring that the information was available to everyone? Was the acquired land properly surveyed and demarcated, with clear boundaries, or was there ambiguity and confusion?
The land valuation and compensation assessment is probably the most contentious part of the process. Were qualified and independent valuers hired to determine the fair market value of the land, improvements, and other assets included in the acquisition? Did the valuation process take into account non-economic losses like displacement, loss of cultural heritage, and disruption of social networks? Was the valuation process transparent, with affected communities able to access the valuation reports?
The negotiation and agreement phase should have provided an opportunity for the government and the community to collaborate and reach a mutually beneficial solution. Were compensation packages negotiated with affected communities based on valuation reports and any additional losses? Was there active participation by community representatives in the negotiation process? Was the negotiated agreement documented in a legally binding contract that detailed the terms of compensation and any other obligations of the government?
The compensation payment and resettlement phase, if necessary, puts the government's commitment to fairness and justice to the ultimate test. Was the agreed-upon compensation promptly and fully paid to the affected parties? Was a comprehensive resettlement plan created and implemented for displaced communities, which included the provision of alternative land or housing, infrastructure and social services in the resettlement area, livelihood restoration programs, and culturally appropriate resettlement?
III. Post-acquisition Phase:
Project implementation must adhere to environmental regulations and social safeguards. Regular monitoring of the project's environmental and community impacts, as well as post-project evaluations to assess the effectiveness of the land acquisition and resettlement programs, are critical. Establishing a grievance redress mechanism to address any complaints that may arise during or after project implementation is also necessary.
- Important Considerations for a Fair and Effective Process:
Transparency and accountability, community participation, fair compensation, respect for cultural heritage, environmental protection, adherence to the rule of law, and a grievance redress mechanism are more than just buzzwords; they are the foundation of a fair and equitable land acquisition process.
Unfortunately, the current situation in Nsulu is marred by the issues that frequently plague land acquisition processes in Nigeria: corruption, a lack of transparency, insufficient consultation with affected communities, low valuation of land and assets, delays in compensation payment, poor resettlement programs, and limited access to justice for affected communities.
We are not against development. We are not against progress. We simply want our rights to be respected, our voices heard, and our future secured. We are willing to collaborate with the government to find a solution that benefits both the community and the state, but this can only be accomplished through open and honest communication, transparency, and a commitment to justice.
Our concern is not with the amount of compensation, especially since the appropriate land size has not been determined. We cannot begin to discuss compensation until the government agrees to sit down with us and negotiate a mutually acceptable land size. In accordance with standard procedure, the government committee should have informed our people about the expected compensation amount. Even so, we believe that the government should provide adequate compensation that reflects the true value of our land and the losses we will incur.
We understand that the government needs land to construct the airport, but we also require land to survive. We are farmers, and our livelihoods are based on the land. Taking away too much land will not only force us to leave our homes, but it will also deprive us of the ability to feed ourselves and our families.
We therefore reiterate our demand that the land acquisition be limited to 400 hectares. This will allow the airport to be built while also ensuring that our community has enough land to farm and sustain its way of life. We urge Governor Alex Otti to hear our plea and take immediate action to address our concerns.
The time to act is now. We are willing to engage in meaningful dialogue with the government, but we will not stand by while our community is destroyed. We will continue to fight for our rights, land, and future. We believe that a just and equitable solution is possible, but it will require a commitment to transparency, fairness, and respect for community rights. We urge the Governor to seize this opportunity to establish a legacy of progress and justice in Abia State. Let the Nsulu Airport be a symbol of inclusive development, rather than one that destroys communities and livelihoods.
Roland Ogbonnaya is a concerned indigene of Nsulu and a Journalist.
(Being Statement delivered at the Association of Nigerian Authors – ANA – Abuja Chapter 70th Birthday Event/Celebration of Dr. Wale Okediran and a Reading/Writers Dialogue held at the Mamman Vatsa Village, Abuja, on the 19th of April, 2025)
In this piece, I want to specifically pose the question of how literature and literary writing can serve the purpose of representing the significance of the public service to the Nigerian public. Narrating the nature, significance and dynamics of the public service, admittedly, is the sphere of the social sciences—especially of political science and public administration. But then, why can literature not come to the aid of the political scientists cum administrative scholar-practitioner in documenting the ups and downs of the public service and its role in enabling good governance?
Literary writings narrate humanity. the human experiences and endeavors in ways that reveal horizons and frontiers of possibilities while also laying bare the depth and dynamics of the familiar. The literary eye sees beyond the normal and transcends the ordinary. All literature reveals their time and context; and this is why literature is a dangerous endeavor: it poses narrative questions that do not reveal easy answers. And yet these questions enable us, if we keep unraveling them long enough, to find a way out of our mental cocoons, according to Elif Shafak, the Turkish novelist. We can all easily agree with C. S. Lewis therefore: “Literature adds to reality; it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
Is the writer then a revolutionary? From Chinua Achebe to Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka to Mariama Ba, from Niyi Osundare to Abdulrazak Gurnah, from Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and from Nadine Gordimer to Odia Ofeimun, we have writers who have championed a rebellious forthrightness in narrating the conditions for the existence of their postcolonial existence and future. We have writers who enable us to see our ordinary experiences and to transcend them. Let us take Odia Ofeimun’s The Poet Lied (1980) as a starting example. That poetry collection signals Ofeimun’s sensibility as a poet who has a deep understanding of the sociopolitical and economic anguish Nigerians have been going through for much of Nigeria’s sixty-five years of existence. As a poet, according to him, “I cannot blind myself/To putrefying carcass in the market place.” In the poet titled “A Foot Note,” Ofeimun laments:
In our model democracy
The magic promises of yesterday
Lie cold like mounds of dead cattle
Along caravans that lead nowhere…
More specifically, in “A Civil Servant,” Odia Ofeimun highlights a critical dimension of any civil and democratic government in terms of the machinery that makes any government function efficiently. This is in terms of policy formulation and service delivery of the dividends of democracy to the citizens.
A dull day:
you sit on the dung-heap
of boredom, a lizard
basking in the cold sunshine
of banal precedents.
Your lymphatic smile
is decorated with the painless anguish
of pedestrian hours
An idle star
streaks across your sky
This dull day
you bear the unproductive patience
of a dismantled industrial spider
you cannot say, for certain, what you want.
This poem represents not only a scathing critique of the neglect of the civil service by any Nigerian government, a neglect that makes the civil servant “sit on the dung-heap of boredom” like a lizard basking in a “cold sunshine.” It is also a poem that hits very hard and poetically at what I have called the bureau-pathology of the Nigerian public service, and its capacity for blind conformance at the expense of productive efficiency. A civil servant, Ofeimun aptly remarks, bears the “unproductive patience” of a “dismantled industrial spider”!
In Niyi Osundare’s “My Lord, Tell Me Where to Keep Your Bribe,” written in 2016 at the height of the corruption scandals that traumatized the sensibility of Nigerians, and especially the undermining of the professional integrity of the Nigerian judiciary. Imagine a servant bowing constantly in fake submissiveness, and asking, “My Lord, where should I keep this bribe?” merely asking that question, with the two contraries of “Lord” and “bribe”, already implies a deep and bruising moral judgement. When we conjoin that with the suggestions of the various hiding places, then we see that the judge being addressed has already, in the space of that monologue, been stripped of all honour. In “No Hiding Place for Politicians,” Osundare was at his poetic height in railing against corruption, embezzlement, clientelism and the betrayal of democratic trust. Take just these lines:
When the man of power
Tells you his tale
Ask him to wait till
You bring a sieve
****
Whoever believes what the politician says
His ear is blocked by the carcass of truth
A politician tells you to wait
And you heed his words…
Your sole will tell you
The biting pains of folly
These few lines already project not only the politician’s alienation from truth, but also the futility of listening to any form of “politicspeak” by which politicians have deceived Nigerians from independence to date. The “biting pain of folly” is what has indeed attended the constant optimism which has characterized Nigerians’ trust in the politicians who come, make noise, get our votes and then turn to stab us all in the back. But then, it behooves the poet, and the writers that a nation has produced, to bring the citizens to awareness. This is exactly what Barbara Kingsolver had in mind when she said, “What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.”
Wale Okediran, who celebrates his entry into the septuagenarian circle this year, provides a larger and more experiential context for examining the mindset of an average Nigerian public servant. In his Tenants of the House (2010), Wale Okediran fictionalized his short-lived experience as a member of the Nigerian House of Representative. That was an experience, we can say, that was stranger than fiction. We get to read the fictional account of what we all know has been going on—the greedy consumption of Nigeria’s commonwealth by a few who translated democratic stewardship into a license to steal and loot. What makes Odia Ofeimun’s and Wale Okediran’s literary accounts so graphic and significant is that both have traversed the public service space in Nigeria for a while. They were not just fictionalizing hearsays and the fecundity of their imagination. Any Nigeria, from what we daily encounter about the shenanigans of the political class, can fictionalize their misdeeds. But when one had walked the corridors of power and perceived the dark odor of political corruption, the literary imagination becomes even more effective than it could have been when fashioned on the imagination alone.
Nigerian literature serves as the handmaiden of social scientific and humanistic inquiry into the state of the Nigerian sociopolitical affairs. As a social commentary, it provides a complementary analysis of where the rain began to beat us as a nation, to quote Chinua Achebe. Indeed, the Nigerian literary space itself suffers significantly from Nigeria’s bureaucratic pathology and policy inchoateness. We all know the cost implication of getting published by a traditional publishing firm today. Many of Nigeria’s literary figures, from Chimamanda Adichie to Nnedi Okoroafor, get published elsewhere. This provides an occasion, therefore, to memorialize the great and persevering efforts of the Association of Nigerian Writers (ANA) for keeping the Nigerian literary spirit alive, and for serving as the breeding ground for literary effervescence.
Nigeria is a literary space; the precarity and suffering instigated by misgovernance and the policy somersault of consecutive administrations in Nigeria provide the occasion for rebellion of the literary imagination. In fact, I am very glad to call on the literary figures in Nigeria as collaborators in the institutional reform of the Nigeria state and its public service machinery. I have often written that institutional and governance reformer is a lonely figure even in social scientific analysis. For more than twenty years, I have been raising the alarm about the debilitating state of the public service in Nigeria, and how institutional reform, as well as the political will of any government, can reverse the rot and restore the machinery of government to an efficient state.
However, these critiques and analyses cannot compare with the fictional narration of Nigeria’s democratic struggles, the greed of its political class and the suffering of Nigerians. Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004) tells the story of Elvis Oke and his struggle to overcome the poverty, violence and corruption of ghetto life in Lagos. Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth (2021) consummates his damning and devastating literary chronicling of the political corruption that has perpetuated a season of anomie in Nigeria since independence. And there are more: Chika Unigwe, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Helon Habila, Chinua Achebe, Unoma Azuah, and many others. When even an average Nigerian encounters these writers and their fictional narration of the inefficiency of the Nigerian government and the suffering it engenders, the novels and short stories mirror their experiences. There is no Nigerian lady who will not empathize with Sisi, Efe, Ama and Joyce, the three ladies –in Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street (2011)—who left Nigeria to become sex workers in Belgium in order to make a good life for themselves.
Literary activism is the response of Nigerian literature to institutional reform that demands that the administrative dynamics must be responsive to the yearning and aspirations of Nigerians. Literary activism encounters the Nigerian public service as the seat of misery and of transformation. Most Nigerians encounter the Nigerian state from the deficiencies of infrastructural debilitation—bad roads and highway networks, inefficient healthcare facilities, inadequate education sector, etc. Literature engages politics from the perspectives of literary visions of possibilities. We can tell the stories of the civil servant who refuses bribes; the Oga who stands up to the powers that be for the sake of efficiency; the public servant who champions transparency even at the cost of losing her legislative slot; a group of civil servants who presents alternative policy implementation blueprints, and many other possible stories of administrative events that can inspire.
Here, ANA has a lot to still do in terms of its commitment to literary activism as a mode of speaking truth to power. I think that the genre of the administrative literary genre should be added to existing genres. Rather than the appearance of the public service as a monolithic endeavor in the literary imagination, ANA can encourage Nigerians to harness their experiences of the multifaceted dynamics of the Nigerian public service system to articulate poems, novels and short stories that speak specifically to civil servants, procedures, departments, and systemic experiences and narratives. I will be glad to see special calls for literary editions around the public service and its dynamics. Such special literary editions can elevate the consciousness of Nigerians on what it means to reflect imaginatively on the present and future of the public service in relation to human flourishing in Nigeria.
For the Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” We owe it to the institutional reformers and literary activists to transform the banality of human suffering in Nigeria to the refreshing discovery of the extraordinary power of social change.
Let me end with a tribute to Dr Wale Okediran at 70. Dr. Okediran has come a long way and has blazed many trails so consistently that at a beautiful age of seventy, he has achieved a sublime legacy that embodies existential fulfilment.
Dr Okediran is in my estimation Nigeria’s answer to C. P. Snow’s two-culture thesis. According to that thesis, there is a significant and unbridgeable divide between the humanities and the natural sciences in ways that ensure seeming lack of communication between the two. The literary intellectuals and the natural scientists pride themselves on their inability to understand each other, and this, Snow argues, leads to an inhibited intellectual progress. In Wale Okediran, we have a fluid and exemplary personification that firmly undermine that thesis. Dr Okediran fluidly incorporates the love for science and the humanities. He is the very embodiment of the renaissance man—the multi-talented man imbued with a secular sensibility that draws on the human condition to articulate an Afropolitan sensibility of humaneness, compassion, strength, open-mindedness, passion and empathy.
It was almost inevitable that Dr Okediran’s love for medicine and literature would be deployed in the service of the humanity in Nigeria and on the continent. Medicine is not just physiological and psychological, at least not in Africa. Medicine ministers to the brutalized bodies of Africans. As a medical doctor therefore, Dr Okediran has the unenviable space to confront the many psychotic manifestations of governance failure in Nigeria. His literary interests and skills provide the opportunity to tell the postcolonial Nigerian stories as he encountered them over the course of his own personal existential and professional trajectories. And this explain Dr Okediran’s path into politics; what better way to effect significant changes than being in the corridor of power?
One could only wonder how long a man of such literary sensibility would last within the murky space of Nigerian politics. Fortunately, public service is not restricted to being a member of the House of Representatives. Dr Okediran’s public service space encompasses the local, the national and the regional—from the National Old Student Association of Olivet Baptist High School to the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA). Dr Wale Okediran’s literary sensibility enables him to build a community of service. The Ebedi International Writers Residency at Iseyin is unique defining sense a built metaphor for Okediran’s enlarged sensibility that draws in people and create possibilities.
[OPINION] Here is how Nonye Soludo and Remi Tinubu are making Nigerians healthier - Ebuka Nwankwo
AdminNonye Soludo, wife of the governor of Anambra State, and Senator Oluremi Tinubu, wife of the president of Nigeria, bring a lot of experience and value to the administrations of their husbands. The case of Senator Oluremi Tinubu is particularly interesting. As someone who has been a first lady in Lagos State for 8 years and a senator for 12 years, she comes with a lot of experience. This is evident in the maturity and class she brings to her work as Nigeria’s first lady. She is obviously in a good position to mentor other first ladies at the subnational levels.
Those who argue that first ladies to not have a constitutional role in Nigeria and try to talk down some of the achievements of some of the hardworking first ladies Nigeria has produced miss the point and seem to have forgotten some of our recent history. One of the greatest and most ambitious poverty alleviation programs in the history of Nigeria – the Better Life Program (BLP) – was championed by one of Nigeria’s first ladies, Mrs. Maryam Babangida. Here is what a 1990 research publication of the Central Bank of Nigeria had to say about BLF: “An overall view of the performance of the rural economy since the inception of the Programme [Better Life Program] suggested some improvements, all of which may not be attributable to the BLP alone. Among these were the growth in income per capita and agriculture in 1988-89; moderation of rural price inflation and unemployment rates of mostly illiterate rural women; marginal improvement in the nutrition status and health of the people; overall awareness of the need for immunization and birth control techniques; marginal improvement in the level of literacy of the rural women, and remarkable improvement in recreational opportunities of a few rural dwellers’’. (CBN (1990). The better life programme and the rural economy of Nigeria. CBN Economic and Financial Review 28(3), 41-58.)
While donating the sum of 1 billion naira to the National Cancer Fund to support the fight against cervical cancer, here is what the wife of the President had to say: “No matter what wealth you have as a nation, if your population or majority of your population is sick, you are just the poorest as far as I am concerned”. In Anambra, Nonye Soludo also shares this mindset. Madam Nonye Soludo’s passion for ‘healthy living’ has resulted in visible lifestyle changes and health benefits in Anambra, according to recent data.
Today, in Anambra State, there are Healthy Living Clubs and Farms in all the 21 local government areas. These clubs have grown in number through the passionate drive and support from Nonye Soludo, who has continued to pass the following message to young people: ‘’Your health is your forever asset and once lost, it’s gone’’. Today, members of Nonye Soludo’s Healthy Living Club have fitness groups and centers all over Anambra. Members of this fitness club are motivated by Nonye Soludo’s passion for fitness and healthy lifestyle. Members support fellow members with exercise and fitness materials and equipment. (Nonye Soludo’s Instagram page shows she leads by example when it comes to body fitness).
And the impact of this over the last 3 years in Anambra has been phenomenal.
Here is what a 68 year old member of the Nonye Soludo Healthy Living Club (real name withheld and would be referred to as Nkechi) had to say about the miraculous healing she received after battling with arthritis for 15 years: ‘’I use to think exercise and owning gym equipment were for people who are rich and have lots of time at their disposal but when I got introduced to these daily routine exercises – including some cardio and weight lifting exercises – I started liking it and I made sure I set out time to do it. A member of our group [Nonye Soludo Healthy Living Club] also gifted me with some light dumbbells. Today, my aching knee that I have been taking painkillers for in the last 15 years has stop troubling me. Most Saturdays, I do 10,000 steps before going to the market, where I trade’’.
Nkechi also has a Healthy Living Farm in her small backyard in her home. Through Nonye Soludo’s Healthy Living Initiative, Madam Soludo has encouraged residents of Anambra to grow healthy and organic foods in available spaces in their homes. Today, in Anambra State, there are large Healthy Living Farms in all 21 local government areas, owned by cooperatives – folks who have used their own resources to cultivate these farms. Vegetables mainly grown in these farms include: tomatoes, green pepper, cabbage and green vegetables. There is a total change of mindset in Anambra when it comes to living a healthy life.
Nkechi’s story is not alone in this kind of testimonies. Beneficiaries of Nonye Soludo Healthy Living Pap have more touching stories. The Healthy Living Pap is an easy to make meal which is made from granulated groundnut, soyabeans and corn. It is reach in vitamins and nutrients. It solely manufactured in a factory in Anambra which is fully funded by Nonye Soludo – without any government support whatsoever. A sachet of this meal weights about 250kg and so far, 10,000 sachets have been distributed to children and nursing mothers in Anambra. There are testimonies from mothers of children, who suffered malnutrition, and are now very healthy as a result of these free meals.
This is also the mindset of Nigeria’s first lady and wife of the President. Through her personal capacity and under her pet project, the Renewed Hope Initiative, Senator Remi Tinubu has pioneered causes that will have long-term impact in the health and wellbeing of Nigerians (this is outside the several economic empowerments she has championed). She is leading by example. Senator Remi Tinubu has donated thousands of professional kits to nurses and midwives around the country. Her support for cervical cancer has enabled the immunization of 12 million girls between the ages of 9 and 13 in the first nine months of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine introduction, according to the National Cancer Fund. The first lady has also donated towards the construction of new hospitals.
Senator Remi Tinubu has received support from well-meaning Nigerians who believe in her cause. “Many of the donations are under her Renewed Hope Initiative… Well-meaning Nigerians are on the governing board and of course it is in the public space. Reputable business men and men of means, with credibility, they have been the ones donating to the Renewed Hope Initiative’’, the Special Adviser to the First Lady on Media, Busola Kukoyi, clarified.
Nonye Soludo and Senator Remi Tinubu have shown that wives of elected public officers can add enormous value to the administrations of their husbands. This is a culture that has existed in the country and even in America, where Mitchelle Obama was known for her fight against childhood obesity and her crusade to encourage healthy lifestyle in children during the administration of her husband, with her Let’s Move crusade. With this program in America, Mrs. Obama partnered with schools, communities, states, private sector, etc.
Nwankwo is the special adviser to Soludo on special projects.