Clay Richie

A group of protesters recently barricaded the Abuja office of Amnesty International (AI) and asked the international organisation to quit Nigeria within 24 hours. One Melvin Ejeh, said to be the Executive Director of Global Peace and Rescue Initiative, (GOPRI) and who spoke on behalf of the protesters reportedly warned that the group would lead other Nigerians on a five-day Occupy Amnesty International protest if the organisation failed to quit Nigeria “within 24 hours”. He was quoted as saying:  “Let us warn at this point that there will be no interval of respite if AI failed to leave Nigeria at the end of the five days as we will activate other more profound options to make the organisation leave Nigeria.”

As a student of politics, I find the huge powers accumulated and constantly expressed by the Senate President Bukola Saraki intriguing. There is almost no day that passes by without Nigerians seeing the power being used in surprising ways.

When President Muhammadu Buhari famously said on May 29, 2015 that he belonged to everybody and to nobody, the public went into a frenzy of interpretations of his philosophical words. Clearly, what he said was a code. It meant something that we did not understand and which he did not bother to explain. How could he, our Sai Baba, who belonged to us during the campaign and to whom we belonged during the voting process, now come out and say publicly that he belonged to nobody after winning the elections? Something was quite wrong from the onset. We didn’t get it. Did these coded words apply to his family, his political associates, to the known sponsors of his victory, to the alliance of political parties that came together to ensure his victory or to the public? It was anybody’s guess. Whether he has acted on or is acting on those words is also anyone’s guess. As with many other important issues haunting our lives, some Nigerians made a sick joke of the President’s declaration and ev...

Hard as this might seem, Nigerians are their own enemies. I don’t know what to call it: National self-determination or national sycophant service? We are truly not prepared yet to see institutions replace individual’s might and that will continue to haunt us from one government to another.

The improving sentiment towards the Nigerian economy was dealt a heavy blow in March following reports of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) warning of a potential economic collapse if the nation failed to move ahead with reforms.

Citing constitutional provisions, Lagos lawyer Femi Falana said the Red Chamber erred for demanding Magu’s sack by the President. He said the Senate, relying on the powers conferred on it under Section 3 (2) of the EFCC Act, 2004, refused to confirm Magu’s appointment as the agency’s substantive chairman. According to Falana, the time to end impunity in the Senate is now, referring to Ndume’s suspension and Sagay’s invitation.

The less you say, the less risk you run of saying something foolish, even dangerous. In 1825, a new czar, Nicholas I, ascended the throne of Russia. A rebellion immediately broke out, led by liberals demanding that the country modernize–that its industries and civil structures catch up with the rest of Europe. Brutally crushing this rebellion, Nicholas I sentenced one of its leaders, Kondraty Ryleyev, to death. On the day of execution, Ryleyev stood on the gallows, the noose around his neck. The trapdoor opened but as Ryleyev dangled, the rope broke, dashing him to the ground.

In February this year, NASA announced the discovery of the new earth. Not one, not two, but seven habitable earthlike structures in outer space with conditions suitable for life. There was no fanfare made. No fuss. No burning of old books. No burying of old paradigms.

All leaders whether great or perfidious have a similar attribute: the sighting of opportunities in crisis and the capitalizing of it to advance their political interests. Adolf Hitler, a tramp who failed twice to make it to the Vienna Arts School and was practically living as a mendicant after his discharge from the army saw the greatest problem of his adopted country, Germany in the unfair terms it suffered from the Treaty of Versailles. He looked inwards and

It is no longer a secret that Senator Bukola Saraki has emerged as a powerful symbol of the rotten sweetness of democratized corruption in Nigeria.  As you read this, the thugs in the pocket of Senator Saraki masquerading as Nigerian senators are tightening the rope of strangulation on President Buhari’s lackluster anti-corruption war. They have vowed that Magu’s head must be cut off or everything in Nigeria will be grounded to a halt. This National Assembly under the leadership of Bukola Saraki is the most dangerously corrupt Assembly in Nigerian history.

On this latest Dino Melaye versus SaharaReporters affair, apart from engaging in a little jokey exchange with some friends over the matter just a while ago, I have kept my mouth firmly shut. This is because since Mr. Melaye and his Senate friends in the form of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and Senator Bala Ibn Na’Allah tried late last year to introduce a harebrained law to shut down free speech on social media, I’ve always considered him a sandwich short of a picnic. In other words, ignoring him seemed the most sensible way to deal with his menace.

I have heard this bit of nonsense constantly – seen it sometimes on social media, in comment boxes or random commentary: that because I actively, enthusiastically and unrepentantly threw personal and professional weight behind the election of a political office holder, I have somehow lost the moral right to speak out against him.

The eventual winner in the war between the Presidency and the Senate will be the average Nigerian. One who has had to sit over the years and watch his leaders loot the treasury dry. One who has helplessly watched Political yahoo boys sell him a ‘change’ for the worse and finally, one who can’t do anything other than what he can – Watch.

Permit me to begin this contribution with an aside. The barbarians that launched a terror attack in Westminster, London, in which four people were killed and much more injured are the same types of people that attacked and beheaded the sons and daughters of Ile Ife in their own homes and on their own land earlier this month.

As a young boy growing in the caring home of a nomadic civil servant, I spent my early childhood criss-crossing many Nigerian states and cities, learning many creeds and cultures, listening to many languages and lessons, having an overdose of the Nigerian folklore.

I once wrote about Nigeria’s “children of anger”, but the country seems to have progressed from anger to clinical depression, resulting in a rise not merely in social aggressiveness, but a determination by certain individuals to escape from it all. The percentage of Nigerians seeking escape through suicide nonetheless remains small relative to the size of the population, but the sharp increase in the number and frequency of reported suicides in the last two years alone speaks to a certain dysfunctionality requiring closer inquiry.

Let me tell you about my driver of seven years. The first sign of trouble when he was recommended was the fact that he didn’t have a job at the time. But he came highly recommended and so I asked to meet him. First question I asked him: Why wasn’t he presently employed?

The deft reporting of The Punch newspaper correspondent in Osun State culminating in an interview published in the papers’ edition of Sunday, March 26, must be commended. The reporter succeeded in tracking down a vulcanizer reported dead in the Ile-Ife mayhem of March 8 and got a good interview.

Nigeria’s population has grown tremendously since from 45.2 million people at Independence 56 years ago, to an estimated 182.2 million people in 2015.  Unfortunately, our population growth has not been matched with an increase in our capability to produce all the things we need and consume as a nation. As our population increased, we became increasingly more dependent on imports to satisfy our booming demand with a huge undesirable impact on the nation’s economy.

On Friday, March 10, 2017, I was one of the speakers at the Vanguard Economic Discourse where the erudite Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo gave the Keynote address. I hereby publish the paper I prepared for the discourse, even though I did not have the luxury of time to give a detailed presentation at the event.

Recently, I had cause to read the memorandum to President Muhammadu Buhari by his mini-me, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State. All I can say is, wow!

For the second time, the Senate has refused to confirm the appointment of Ibrahim Magu as the chairman of the EFCC.

For one or two years now, the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Monetary Policy Committee has retained the monetary policy rate (MPR) at 14%. The MPR is just a peg, the lowest interest rate a bank in Nigeria may charge its customer. Of course that applies between banks. When an “ordinary” bank customer approaches a commercial bank for a loan, the story is always different. They get nothing below 25%, but it could be as high as 35% for some customers.

It was midnight, not so long ago, when I woke up, used the toilet and returned to my bed to continue from where I stopped. For almost an hour, I closed my eyes in vain. I could neither induce nor seduce sleep. I was rolling from one end of the bed to the other, like a footballer faking injury. I decided to go into my study, to prove to sleep that I could use the time for something else. My study is a junkyard. I tip-toed through the wreckage of books, old newspapers and all sort, and aimed for a particular Ghana-must-go housing old magazines. I randomly picked three editions of Newswatch magazine and went back to bed.

Fellow Nigerians, let me take you on historical excursions today. At this unfortunate time that History is not a compulsory subject in our school curriculum, it is pertinent to educate ourselves properly about our dear beloved nation. For those who may not know, Ile-Ife is the ancestral home of all Yoruba people. Please, ignore attempts by all manner of historians attempting to rewrite history. Ile-Ife occupies an eminent space on the world map today, and as far back as I can remember, as being the cradle of Yoruba civilisation, at the very least. That is why you will find that all Yoruba’s in the diaspora lay claim to no other ancestral home than Ile-Ife. The Ooni of Ife is their revered King.

I learnt an enduring lesson on the day General Sani Abacha died. It was June 8, 1998, and death had laid its icy hands on the maximum ruler, and the scepter had fallen from the grip of the king. I was deputy editor of National Concord, the newspaper owned by Basorun M.K. O Abiola, the man Abacha not only inveigled out of his mandate as democratically elected President, but whom he had also locked up in military gulag for five years.

Fluctuating real exchange rate impairs economic growth in resource rich countries. In countries with the Dutch disease, the real exchange rates move with the prices of natural resources.  Nigeria is a perfect example of such countries.

I hope the President does not see this as personal. What is at stake here is bigger than him. It is the future of the war against corruption and the survival of Nigeria.

Some days ago I stumbled on an amusing and similarly bemusing headline – “Acting President Osinbajo is not a ‘Nigerian”. It was a brief but interesting piece written by a lecturer, Dr. Emmanuel Ufuophu-Biri, who after watching on live TV, the gracious manner with which the Vice President Osinbajo (then acting president conducting the affairs of the nation while President Buhari was on medical leave) managed an engagement with some Niger-Delta stakeholders in Edo State, concluded that the VP was not a “Nigerian”.

Creative dysfunction is sometimes an unofficial government tool. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo occasionally set top government officials up against themselves to test their loyalty or ideas. But there was no doubt who was in charge. US President, Donald Trump, is reputed to have the worst cabinet in modern US history, comparable in its dysfunctionality only to Richard Nixon’s.

The return of democratic rule in Nigeria in 1999 coincided somewhat with the arrival of the digital age in Nigeria. In this period of nearly 20 years, never before have we witnessed the level of criminalisation of the voice of dissent as we see today under the APC-led administration. One key question that needs to be asked, however, is whether the current ruling party would have taken over power in 2015 if the previous government had criminalised dissent in the same way that they have chosen to do. As I write, news has just filtered through of the gruesome killing of Abdulkareem Bauchi, a blogger who was reported missing in Bauchi recently.

A fallout of Dinogate: some ABU students and alumni have been roaming the internet with the good news of ABU’s greatness. I have often advocated that misbehaving Nigerian public officials should be dragged to the Eagle Square and flogged publicly. Anybody talking about any University in Nigeria today and the words “great”, “excellent”, and “exceptional” appear in his sentences should be taken to the Eagle Square and shot.

Business Aviation has a terrible reputation in West Africa. Unfortunately, private jets are still seen in the region as expensive toys for playboy millionaires, insensitive and wasteful Heads of States/Senior Government Officials or politicians and others who acquired their wealth through questionable means. And yet it need not be so.

The most important of life’s battles is the one we fight daily in the silent chambers of the soul—David O. Mckay  Even though I had watched the two minute Youtube clip, “Silent Battles” several times on WhatsApp, what the young man was saying offered a whole new meaning last Sunday afternoon. That was after someone reposted it on a platform, following the newsbreak that a medical doctor whose name was later revealed as Allwell Orji had just jumped headlong into the lagoon off Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos.

One of my major points of discontent with the President Muhammadu  Buhari administration is the shallowness of its anti-corruption campaign. Right from the day he commenced his campaign as candidate of the All Progressives Congress, I discerned that unless he eventually acquired some earthshaking insight in the course of administering Nigeria, Buhari was going to make no significant gain in his passion without vision on this front.

No, not me! I certainly don’t!! Rather, this post seeks to unravel something that, to many people, is a mystery: Why do Nigerian public servants do everything to avoid retiring from their positions, while public servants in other countries are holding protests to LOWER the retirement age?

I welcome you back home from your vacation in London. I am happy to see you address the nation once again; may God grant you good health to lead the nation. Now that you are back Sir, I’ll like to share some things with you that I think can change the Nigerian economy. Firstly, I am going to talk about our major problem which is Energy supply (Electricity).

The refusal of the Senate to confirm Ibrahim Magu for the second time as chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has, expectedly, sent tongues wagging and threw up all kinds of theories including the one alluded to by Senator Shehu Sani representing Kaduna Central in an interview with Vanguard newspaper recently.

I got a lot of panicked responses after my last piece; the panic focused on one small nugget of information buried within it: the fact that, as things stand today, former president Goodluck Jonathan is the strongest candidate that the People’s Democratic Party can present in 2019. So I decided to run slight interference, and do a follow up.

We in the political class spend too much time politicking and too little time governing. And this is not a challenge for the ruling All Progressive Congress alone. We in the Peoples Democratic Party also have our challenges in this regard. We are too fixated with the leadership struggle between Ali Modu Sheriff and Ahmed Makarfi and this is just needless.

The Punch of the 13th of March 2017 has as its headline “Controversy as Buhari extends perm sec’s tenure twice.” The story has it that President Muhammadu Buhari has extended the tenure of the Permanent Secretary Ministry of Education, Dr Jamila Shuara, by another year.

I read in the news that 4,700 Nigerians were forcefully evicted from their homes in Otodo-Gbame community in Lagos State, in one single day in March of 2017. According to the same news report, about 30,000 were earlier evicted in November of 2016. Now, according to the government, they are doing this to pave the way for “developmental projects,” but that is balderdash as we all know the people who will get those lands. But you are not afraid, and neither are you angry.

Retired Colonel Hameed Ali, the Comptroller General of the Nigerian Customs Service, is a proud and stubborn man. His disdain for others and insufferable arrogance is not only vexatious to the spirit but also downright nauseating.

Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, a former speaker of Nigeria’s House of Representatives and current governor of Sokoto state, mainstreamed the term “body language” into our national discourse. Presenting a paper during the international anti-corruption day 2014 roundtable organised by the Nigeria Bar Association, Tambuwal said, “The President’s (Dr Goodluck Jonathan) body language seems to be encouraging corrupt practices in the country.”

The separation of powers theory is what shot Baron De Montesquieu to fame. His radical ideas which the then decrepit monarchy viewed with utmost suspicion was the remote cause of the popular 1789 French revolution which made France the first country in the entire Europe to jettison the monarchy for a republic. One of his quotes is apt and evergreen ‘When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

Appalled by the rising rate of suicide in Nigeria these days, I’ve decided to speak to potential victims today. I’ve been reminded that I’d commented on this issue in the Sunday column of April 1, 2012. It’s a relief to republish the article today, for little has changed.

Nigerians talk a good game about third party candidacies, especially Nigerians on social media. They often speak about this utopia where Nigerians have had more than two options for president of Nigeria, and we could have chosen any of these options instead of what they consider less-than-ideal alternatives in our last two national election cycles.

No thanks to the unholy machinations of an unscrupulous cabal in the presidency which formed a satanic partnership with a shamelessly crooked senate, Ibrahim Magu, nominee of President Muhammadu Buhari as substantive Chairman of Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), was for the second time denied confirmation for that post by the senate on the strength of the same ill-motivated Department of State Service (DSS) security report that informed the first purported rejection.

The southern Nigeria state of Cross River used to be known as an area with some of the oldest tropical rain forests in the West African region, with mangrove swamps on the coastal zones and some of the rarest species of organisms to boot. However, that reserve is being threatened, including the famous Cross River National park, Ukpong and Ekuri forests, identified as a biodiversity hot spot.

During the week, the Nigeria public sphere was filled with discussions of a judgment which placed Coca-Cola Nigeria in a bad shape as an organisation which is concerned more with financial gain over the health of its millions of consumers.