Clay Richie

If Senator Ovie Omo-Agege decides to run for Delta State governorship in the 2023 elections, the only force that can stop him is the force of God and the will of the people. I don’t see him running, for the stage he currently occupies has grown beyond Dennis Osadebey. He is like a volcanic acid that can’t be curtailed. The Warri blood in him makes him aim for the very best leaving the crumbs for others to scramble for. In all of these, he is never desperate, rather leaving everything to God, chance and political leadership.

Let me start with a fairly old story which was recently repackaged and circulated on the social media. It’s about two friends; one Nigerian and the other from an Asian country. The Nigerian paid a visit to his friend who had been appointed a minister a few years earlier and was surprised at the magnificent house that his friend had built for himself. He asked him how he made the money to build such a house. The minister took him to his balcony and pointed to a well paved road.

In August 2018, one month after I ‘moved’ into a rented apartment, Ikeja Electric sent me a power consumption bill in excess of N22,000. This was daylight robbery; I knew there was no chance I’d consumed a quarter of that — because even though the house was mine, it also wasn’t. What Ikeja Electric didn’t know was that it was my decoy house.

Pastor and Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Yemi Osinbajo, is fighting one of the major battles of his political life at the moment. Thankfully, he seems to have vanquished his traducers. The war is won! Or so it seems. Last week, the Elect of God went on trial in the court of public opinion. Just like Our Lord Jesus Christ in the court of Pontius Pilate. According to the charges of the prosecution, Osinbajo had allegedly laundered the sum of N90 billion, Nigerian money, using the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) as conduit. My Lord, the trial judge, had hardly begun the suit by the time the charges died a natural death. Osinbajo was acquitted of all of them. He was carried shoulders-high even as the legal juggernaut and dedicated Man of God sniggered at his traducers.

God forgive me. When Yemen’s Houthi rebels hit two key oil installations in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago, I was not sad. I read somewhere that oil could hit $100 as a result and the little rascal in me smiled. I was thinking of the extra revenue for Nigeria, the impact on our forex reserve position, the lifeline for the naira and the infrastructure President Muhammadu Buhari could build with the extra income. I may not be able to vouch for Buhari’s ability to speak ex tempore in a panel discussion or give a Martin Luther Kingish speech, but I can say that if he has access to good money — as others had when oil was $100 — Nigeria will become a huge construction site.

THE SHAMEFUL MACABRE DANCE BY THE SSS AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. The report that the Federal Government will petition Justice Taiwo to the NJC for ordering Sowore’s release is beautiful nonsense. That will be an unprecedented executive rascality. The SSS did not require a court order to release Sowore. He should have been freed the moment the 45 days elapsed.

BACKGROUND It will be recalled that on the 28th of August 2019, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked the Queen to hold her customary speech in mid-October, a move many believed was calculated to suspend Parliament for a month and tactically limit lawmakers’ time to block a no-deal BREXIT. This singular request by the PM amplified the drama and intrigues surrounding the UK’s decision to withdraw its membership of the European Union. The Queen acting pursuant to the request by the PM ordered as follows: “It is this day ordered by Her Majesty in Council that the Prorogued on a day no earlier than Monday the 9th day of September and no later than Thursday the 12th day of September 2019 to Monday the 14th day of October 2019,”

In May 2019, an NTA State House correspondent interviewing President Muhammadu Buhari dropped what I consider to be a huge Freudian slip midway through the session. After a few seconds of obligatory flattery and sweet talk, he asked the question, “How would you describe yourself? Who is Muhammadu Buhari?”

Fellow Nigerians, the title of my epistle to you this week is an adaptation of the title of a sitcom which was produced and directed by the legendary Amaka Igwe of blessed memory. No other title better describes and encapsulates the total confusion, chaos and conflagration ongoing in the powerhouse of Aso Rock in Nigeria right now. I swear, it won’t be an exaggeration to say I have never witnessed such rivalry combined with ribaldry, and tomfoolery before.

Nigerian politicians are always preoccupied with selfish and regional interests at the expense of our collective good as a nation. Even when our elected politicians have hardly provided a pointer to how they would justify their individual and collective mandates, their preoccupations have been about what would come their ways in the distant future. Specifically, their noises have been about where the presidency would be coming from in 2023. Incidentally, the status of the current presidency has yet to be determined by the Supreme Court.

“Economic inequality in Nigeria has reached extreme levels, and is playing out in the housing sector, with an estimated shortage of 22 million units (side by side) with luxury dwellings in cities, made possible by forced eviction of poor communities many of which do not fulfil any housing needs and remain vacant” –The United Nations Rapporteur on Special Procedures, Ms Leilana Farha, cited in Nigerian Tribune, Tuesday, September 24, 2019.

Over the weekend, supporters of former President Goodluck Jonathan came up with a funny idea while mocking the travails of SaharaReporters publisher, Omoyele Sowore, who is presently in the Department of State Services’ gulag for, among other attributed sins, insulting President Muhammadu Buhari. According to them, Sowore had it coming because his criticisms of Jonathan promoted disaffection that led to the latter’s electoral loss. They said, unlike the present administration, Jonathan did not hassle his critics because he was tolerant; a trait often mistook for weakness. You see, Nigeria has this cyclical hex that makes our yesterdays almost always look better than our todays, and we tend to look back at our imperfect past and pine for the “good old days.”

Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai dominated the media space on Monday as he enrolled his six-year-old son, Abubakar, in the state’s 62-year-old Capital School, Malali. Capital School is one of the legacies of the late Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello. The governor was the first to break the news on the state government’s Twitter handle @GovKaduna before one of his aides, Samuel Aruwan, confirmed the report.

Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, set the social media alight on Monday when he published the photograph of his six-year-old son, Al-Siddique, as the boy was being enrolled in the state government-owned Kaduna Capital School.

There is this interesting WhatsApp story of a drunkard who woke up one morning deeply repentant after a bitter fight with his wife the previous night. Intent on ameliorating the situation and turning a new leaf, the man took out the crate of beer he believed was responsible for his character flaw and started smashing the empty bottles. He smashed the first bottle saying, “You are the reason I fight with my wife every day!” He smashed the second bottle, “You are the reason I don’t love my children!” He smashed the third bottle, “You are the reason I don’t have a decent job to take care of my family!”

“After realising that the government was not ready to stop the killing of our people by these two groups, we decided to pay back with reprisals. From that day, we decided to kill at least 50 people whenever one of us was killed” –Hassan Dantawaye, commander of bandits in Zamfara State, The PUNCH, August 17, 2019.

Without urgent reform of the judiciary which is engulfed in corruption, which this government is further promoting, foreign investors will always avoid investing in Nigeria. Or who should be those stupid foreign investors to invest in a country where the judiciary is for the highest bidders and where business disputes taken to court could last in our courts for decades, making justice delayed the same thing as justice denied?

Two recent governance events underlined the waning strength of government in our democracy. Contextually, the waning strength of government is unrelated to the capacity to defend the nation; but instead, refers to the diminution of democratic institutions, the very pedestal on which any democracy is built.

The Supreme Court of Nigeria is the nation’s final court of appeals on all matters – socioeconomic, political, cultural, traditional and even religious. It also serves as court of first instance on matters for interpretation of the Nigerian Constitution. The Supreme Court has also been the final court of appeal for presidential election ligations and petitions, on both election and pre-election matters.

Godwin Obaseki, the Governor of Edo State, who is also the Chairman of the Ad-hoc Committee of the National Economic Council on Crude Oil Theft, Prevention and Control, revisited the menace of crude oil theft in the country by painting a dire picture of the problem when he recently in Abuja stated that in the first six months of 2019, the nation lost about 22 million barrels of its produced crude oil to oil theft. He said “if nothing was done to curtail the ugly trend, the figure could double by the end of the year.”

President Muhammadu Buhari recently set up an Economic Advisory Council, to replace the country’s Economic Management Team. He also moved some departments and agencies of government to the new Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development. I don’t see why this should become a source of agitation and frustration for some Nigerians. The Economic Advisory Council is chaired by Professor Doyin Salami, a seasoned intellectual.  The members are persons of great technocratic ability with a track record of achievement as economists and policy wonks. The Council will meet every month and meet with the President every quarter. The Nigerian economy can certainly benefit from new ideas and perspectives.

When I read the charges against Omoyele Sowore, the publisher of Sahara Reporters, I laughed. Cyberstalking, insulting the President and other such ridiculous charges. Sowore has not lied against General Buhari even up to a quarter of the lies he told against Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, yet Jonathan never once contemplated arresting him.

The concept of Aladimma in the Igbo world view is not a claim of having it all and good at all times, and certainly not built on sitting in recrimination over the disaster of a consequential war waged on them and the other Eastern Nigerians in an avoidable chain of actions escalated by the egos of otherwise professional soldiers who departed their careers and delved into statecraft for which they were ill-prepared.

The Nigerian Judiciary has fallen. It has crashed and self-destructed. All hope of bringing it back to life seems lost. There is neither trust nor confidence in our judiciary anymore. Let me adapt Abba’s song, “Money, money, money … it’s a rich man’s world” and the judiciary is in full disco dance to the tune of money which at end of the day is used to blackmail them into line by a government determined to get its way at all cost. Evidential jurisprudence has lost its place and meaning to our judges. Across the states, judges have become errand boys and girls to state governors. They don’t even pretend anymore.

Much as Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, the pastor-Vice President and his team try to hide it, it is obvious, as observers have noted that this is not the best of times for the legal luminary, who was against all odds, chosen to be President Muhammadu Buhari’s running mate in the run off to the 2015 Presidential election.

I admit that it’s always ill-advised to use the word “never” when you prognosticate the outcome of a future event. The vagaries of life can throw a wrench to the works of the most auspicious auguries. I know that. Nevertheless, I am prepared to go out on a limb and proclaim that in spite of his feverishly desperate, frenzied, backstabbing machinations, Bola Ahmed Tinubu can never be Nigeria’s president. Here’s why.

What is patriotism? The definition should be fairly straightforward: loving your country. One of my favourite all-time tunes is the 1988 song, “Nation and the People”, by The Mandators, with the refrain: “Love your country/Your nation and the people”. They sang passionately: “Some are trying to find solutions to all the problems we have/Some are trying to make it impossible for the problems to be solved.” The song progresses deeper philosophically: “Must you sell your father’s land for the love of this vanity now?” If I were to start a civic club for secondary school students in the country, this song would be the anthem. It is an immortal call to patriotism.

Every great and rational leader means well for the governed. Many want to be remembered for good by leaving behind great legacy. The challenge in this is the process, attitude and communications. President Buhari’s team seems to have good plan and mean well if one looks behind the veils. Unfortunately what I have seen over the years is government keeps overlooking the basic, presenting an attitude it is in ‘militocracy’ instead of democracy.

When I read the news of the recent removal of VP Osinbajo from his statutory role as the head of our National Economic council what flickered through my mind was the statement credited to late Dele Giwa  which states thus : No evil committed by man can go unpunished ,if not now then later ,if not by God then certainly by men ,for the victory of evil over good is only but temporary.

Fellow Nigerians, please allow me to quickly apologise for not concluding the series I started last week on the importance of celebrity journalism, the basis of my Fellowship at The African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. The reason for this change of plan must be pretty obvious, and predictable. A subject of pressing, and urgent, importance, and necessity, has presented itself. And it has to do with the systematic and instalmental, harassment, intimidation, degradation and denudation of our dear beloved Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s recent replacement of the Economic Management Team (EMT) headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo with an Economic Advisory Council (EAC) headed by Prof. Doyin Salami has led to speculations on the import of this move, including for the continued relevance of Osinbajo, (seen, at least during the government’s first term in office, as the poster boy of the Buhari administration).

It’s not all the time that people who can fix things up especially in politics show up on the radar. Sometimes people with such skill set and competency are like the meteor or comet that appear once in a life time. They are the likes of Karl Rove, a USA political consultant.

A chain of events in the past one week gave me pause about this unpopular government and an agenda it is executing at our expense. It happened that the co-founder of BudgIT, an NGO that advocates fiscal transparency, Seun Onigbinde, had taken an appointment as a Technical Adviser to the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning. Before now, he was a harsh critic of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, who used his social media handles to share his passionate opinions of the government. To forestall the now familiar habit of cybercitizens quickly rummaging through the social media account of a recent appointee to find evidence of why they are undeserving of the honour, Onigbinde took down his Twitter account.

The harmattan is coming early for the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In one week alone, the party lost at the presidential election tribunal, and also left daggers in the backs of two of its contestants in governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelsa, only a few months away to the polls.

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” – Nelson Mandela.

With tension brewing between the United States and Iran following last week attack on a Saudi Arabian oil facility which removed as much as five percent of global supplies, there has been an unprecedented jump in the price of crude. With that, there is the temptation to believe Nigeria will benefit from the current ‘harvest’. But it is highly unlikely for two reasons. One, whatever gain we make from an increase in the sale of crude, it will go to subsidy payments because the landing cost of imported fuel will also increase. Two, the real beneficiaries of whatever ‘windfall’ comes from this crisis are likely to be oil thieves.

In the past week, the Nigerian and indeed African media has been enchanted by the phenomenal benevolence of Air Peace airlines and its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Allen Ifechuku Onyema.

Nigeria is standing on the edge of a dangerous cliff. It is just a matter of time before it tips over. Rather than the current emotional and politically driven call for a “Revolution”, we all really need to calmly analyse and situate the cause(s) of our problems. In any case, a revolution without a vanguard is a recipe for anarchy.

We are told that South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa apologised on Saturday for the xenophobic attacks against foreigners living in South Africa, particularly persons involved in business who are seen by the ordinary South African as enemies. He reportedly did this in Harare, Zimbabwe, at the funeral ceremony of former President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Most appropriately, the South African President was booed.

The New York Times had this report two days ago about Boko Haram militants “still roaming the countryside with impunity.” It actually titled that report: ‘Boko Haram is back. With better drones’. The American newspaper dropped hints about the terrorists using “sophisticated drones.” It did not elaborate on this – and provided no proofs. That report was a direct violation of the latest order from our Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai. He released a statement on Friday warning the media against “giving prominence to the criminal activities of the  terrorist group (Boko Haram) through sensational headlines.” Doing so, he said, “violates the Terrorism Prevention Act 2011.”

By its nomenclature alone, newly created Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development should be appealing to almost every Nigerian. Who doesn’t need one form of humanitarian assistance or the other these days? At least 75% of the country’s population does. And they’re not just those displaced by insurgency and natural disasters; they include the poor, the destitute, and the physically and mentally challenged. The unemployed would certainly cherish social development, as would everyone else that desires a higher standard of living. Almost every Nigerian is threatened by social disorders such as illiteracy, ignorance, armed robbery, drug addiction, kidnapping and terrorism – these are the usual causes of man-made humanitarian crises.

We just went through the worst presidential election in Nigeria’s history. To add insult to injury, we have now been assaulted with the worst judicial verdict in the history of Nigeria. The presidential election petitions tribunal (PEPT) delivered a judgment on Atiku’s petition against INEC’s declaration of President Muhammadu Buhari as the winner of the February 2019 presidential election, and it was one of the most outrageous judicial verdicts I have ever heard.

I have a distant acquaintanceship with Seun Onigbinde, meaning, if I wanted to, I could have privately congratulated him on his appointment as Technical Adviser (Budget & Planning) to the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning. My congratulations to Onigbinde will be public, via this critical piece. If he accepts it in good faith, he would have successfully passed his first post-appointment test ahead of assumption of duties: the grace to accept constructive criticism. It would mean, too, that he has learnt that having crossed to the other side, he has now turned himself in to millions of Nigerians as a subject of periodic criticism. It won’t matter if he doesn’t; he has an initial, renewable six months on this job, long enough to become accustomed to dealing with criticism, plus many years of what I predict will be a lengthy political adventure. Congratulations!

Travelling to any country through irregular means is never an easy deal. From the physical and psychological risks to financial and relational burdens, irregular migration often ends in futility. For many migrants attempting to reach Europe from Africa, recent trends show that more restrictions and dangers now exist both internally and externally. Over 900 people are reportedly dead in 2019 while attempting to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.

Traditional rulers have a pivotal role towards absolute tranquillity in a society. As the microcosms of government, traditional rulers are abreast of every nook and cranny of their domains, which gives them necessary tools to know the goings-on within their areas. They also have the machinery to know each individual, whether natives or non-natives, residing in their area.

You would think it was a scene from Geoffrey Chaucer’s classics, The Canterbury Tales and its tale of a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Members of the Election Jury (EJ) have journeyed from earth to Heaven and are standing in the dock before The Throne, their hands clasped behind them like convicts about to deliver an alocutus. They are led by their Chairman, Justice Buba Ibrahim. Faces ashen like a four-day old excrement mercilessly petered by an angry downpour, they had died a few hours earlier and had been brought straight to the presence of The Great One.

At the end of the Nigerian Civil War (July 1967 – January 1970), and in preparation for a possible return to civilian rule, the ruling class established—or rather, creatively adapted—the dual principle of “zoning” and “rotation” of key political party offices and government positions among geopolitical segments of their class.

Scary. That, in one word, captures my conclusion after reading a chapter on judgment debts in Mr Mohammed Bello Adoke’s book, Burden of Service: Reminiscences of Nigeria’s Former Attorney-General, which is due for public release tomorrow. If care is not taken, judgment debts will bankrupt this country. For starters, judgment debts are court-ordered payments for breach of contract, infringement of rights and other failings on the part of the state. It is very, very scary the rate at which courts and tribunals are slamming heavy awards on the federal government because of avoidable lapses — although I reckon that some of these things are also orchestrated.

The consensus opinion that has emerged is the tremendous capacity of President Muhammadu Buhari to foster and deepen political dichotomies and divisions. Political science scholars and students would find the trend particularly amenable to classification. A classificatory template has emerged that can near perfectly predict the governance and political behaviour of the President. On account of its large scale ethno regional diversities, Nigeria is prone to divisions and dichotomies-which prompted the reasoned constitutional prescription of federalism as foundational principle of association. Federalism is the constitutional structural model that holds out the promise of achieving unity amidst diversity in which our pluralism can be harnessed as strength and not distorted into weakness and dysfunction. Democracy is the worst form of government but no better alternative has been found is the analogy of the utility of federalism for Nigeria. And in our empirical experience, the t...

It all started as a joke, or one of those my brainwaves. I had toyed with the idea of heading back to school for further studies. But I was quite confused about which school, what course and when. I think my greatest enemy is time. I’m so permanently occupied with one activity or the other that I often wonder if I would ever have the chance and time to take time out, or even laze about, once in a while, like regular people. I believe I must have picked the habit of multitasking from two of my mentors and role models like Chief Moshood Abiola and Dr Mike Adenuga Jr. It amazes me how much work those two have packed into one lifetime. But they have fired me up with their drive, determination and ambition, so much that work has become an addiction.