Clay Richie

To say America is ‘exciting’ right now will be a major understatement. President Trump is releasing Executive Orders like confetti everyday and that’s before we even get to what he tweets everyday. But there’s something more interesting going on. America’s Presidency is a powerful office, not just in America, but around the world.

It is quite possible that our president and the ministers might not know since some of them don’t use hospitals in the country and so do not buy drugs here, but drugs’ prices are on the rise. It is not just the regular price increases we are witnessing under the Buhari government, but a steep increase in price as a result of the policies enunciated in the 2017 budget.  The federal government has raised import duties not only on items like SUVs, yachts, boats, fabrics, wheat flour among others but also on drugs particularly anti-malarial and antibiotics. You wonder how the government could lump drugs in the same group as luxury goods.

General Collin Powell tells me that “A dream does not become a reality through magic, it takes sweat, determination and hard work” John Lennon also tells me that “Being honest may not get you many friends but it will always get you the right ones” My people, the biggest political news in Nigeria today is the massive movement of Igbo political leaders into APC. From Enugu to Anambra, Ebonyi, Imo and Abia the story is the same – APC all the way.

I am not a fan of Donald Trump, the incumbent President of the United States. I didn’t stand with him. I stood with her- Hillary Clinton- in the last US Presidential election. No other election in recent American history has been more international in terms of interest and emotional involvement. Trump’s election even divided the Nigerian middle class.  Majority of Christians in Nigeria stood with Donald Trump. They liked his anti-Muslim rhetoric, and in a country where religion is such a volatile subject and the Christian community feels as if it is under siege from radical Islamic extremism, it was easy for a category of Nigerians to see Trump’s politics being in sync with their own fears and expectations.

I am quite amused by a lot of Nigerians who see the world through the foggy prism of their national condition. Take the example of how they now view the United States and its politics. They completely ignore the fact that the United States is a superpower with wide influence all over the world and that its policies, favourable or not to Nigeria (depending on whoever is interpreting them), should not be the basis or at least the only basis of judging her politics.

Let me start with a confession. I like apple products, from the iPod, through the iPad to the iPhone and of course the iTunes. Apple makes beautiful and very user-friendly products and sometimes, they are intoxicating, seductive and addictive. This write up, however, is not about the products as such, as it is about innovation and what happens when the human intellect is combined with a thinking-friendly environment and a clime that supports creativity and industry.

It is politically correct and simplistic for anyone to demand the arrest and prosecution of Apostle Johnson Suleiman, the outspoken and controversial Founder and General Overseer of the Omega Fire Ministries over his recent belligerent utterances against those said by the Nigerian government to be aliens from Mali, Niger, Chad and other neighboring countries; the so-called Fulani herdsmen.

Finally, last weekend, Africa was saved another political and humanitarian mess when President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia agreed to surrender the leadership he lost in the December 2016 election.

After reading that former President Olusegun Obasanjo has canvassed the emergence of the next Nigerian president from the south-east geopolitical zone, I suspected he had voiced a decision of the kingmakers. Nobody becomes Nigeria’s president without the endorsement of the kingmakers also called “godfathers”, “the cabal” or “the mafia”. Elections are mere rubberstamps.

President Donald Trump has promised to get Americans off welfare by rebuilding America with American labour. He has promised an end to the era where their borders were open to countries stealing their companies,making their products and destroying their jobs.America will no longer enhance foreign industries at the detriment of its own and will no longer spend trillions overseas while its infrastructure continues to decay.It will not protect other countries’ borders at the expense of its own and will not empower other armies while its gets depleted.

Sigh. Usually, the most tricky topic for me to discuss regarding Nigeria’s nationhood is religion and ethnicity. Difficult to discuss not because I’m afraid of being verbally molested and splashed with mud, but because emotive issues hardly lend themselves to reason. Ethno-religious matters are so emotionally charged that reason is always the first casualty. When emotions trump reason, we can never reach a consensus on finding lasting solutions. Yet it is solutions, not emotions, that we need in these trying times. We badly need peace. You will say there cannot be peace without justice — and I will add that there cannot be justice without reason.

In a week when Africa riveted on former President Yahya Jammeh’s tantrums, an event that could have shaken the continent to its core slipped below the radar.

Since President Muhammadu Buhari travelled to London, United Kingdom penultimate Thursday, a lot has happened. As of the time he was leaving the country, the Vice-President (sorry, Acting President), Yemi Osinbajo was in Davos, Switzerland where he was leading Nigeria’s delegation to this year’s World Economic Forum. He cut short the trip and arrived the country a few hours after Buhari left.

I used to think that the creators of the Mavrodi Mondial Movement, aka MMM, were smart people going by the fact that they were able to come up with such a brilliant Ponzi scheme that enabled them to make off with people’s money as the ultimate pen robbers, but I have since been undeceived and have now come to the inevitable conclusion that the operators of the MMM scheme are not smart after all. If they were smart, after President Muhammadu Buhari cleared Babachir Lawal, what they should have done is immediately apply to him for clearance! After all, our President is the best clearing agent in Nigeria.

Fellow Nigerians, please allow me to say wherever two or more Nigerians are gathered these days the topic of discussion must, naturally, dovetail to our dear President’s state of health and the consequential suggestion that our country is ailing as a result. This controversy didn’t start today. I remember how Governor Peter Ayodele Fayose, the enfant terrible of Ekiti State, raised a horrific alarm, just before the 2015 election that eventually catapulted Major General Buhari back to power. He had screamed to the whole world, indeed to high heavens, that the then APC Presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, had suffered brain damage and that he had to be flown abroad in an air ambulance for treatment. I was in London at that time and I remember making frantic calls to impeccable sources who I believe would know the truth. I was able to obtain pictures of visitors to the modest apartment General Buhari was staying at the time, which was somewhere in the high brow Mayfair.

All Nigeria needs from President Buhari is captured in just one word. Leadership. Leadership in steering the Nigerian state to a better state of being. Leadership in managing the economy. Leadership in ensuring that infrastructure across the country is brought with current reality. Leadership in ensuring that the Nigerian economy grows and remain healthy so that citizens and inhabitants of the Nigerian space can access a better life and contribute to the well being of society.

It has been quite a while since I last wrote a personal article as it relates to our dear Nation; Nigeria. Infact, since the election of President Muhammad Buhari on the Platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), I have not written a conventional article. Even though, in the intervening period, I have continued to contribute to National discourse through my social media interactions.

The world is visibly on a superhighway. A closer look at the happenings in the world out there will reveal amazing developments that point to this fact. The growing attention and investment in modern infrastructure and technology as a means to address socio-economic constraints, especially by some African countries like South Africa and Kenya, are good examples of how visionary nations are taking sensible routes in the race towards progress.

I have argued before that the Nigerian state appears organized around the principle of inflicting maximum emotional aggravation, and, often, severe physical pain, on citizens and other occupants of the space called Nigeria.

"Not a single soul has been prosecuted, let alone jailed for the genocide in Southern Kaduna and you are blaming someone for preaching self defense? You are INSANE. Yes, INSANE"- Olufemi Korode, Twitter, 24th January 2017. Can anyone dispute the fact that Mr. Korode is right? Are those that say that Christians should not defend themselves or complain when they are being slaughtered not completely insane?

Donald John Trump is finally the president of the United States of America. Expectedly, there is a palpable tension around the world. The Americans themselves have remained apprehensive. Countries in the East and the West are gripped in fervent fear. Even those in Africa are not left behind, all quivering as if though they have never encountered an American horror movie before. Nigeria, however, must not expose itself to the flitting phobia. As Mr. Trump himself would say, what the hell do we have to lose?

It now seems obvious that those who sold the idea of change to President Muhammadu Buhari did not reach what lawyers call ad idem with him from the outset. Ad idem refers to a meeting of minds of parties involved in a contract on the very essence of that agreement. It is a critical ingredient whose absence is able to vitiate any contract subjected to the test of law.

Even when I am not so much into the social media, I have come to like WhatsApp because of the inspirational stories many users pass around on the platform from which I learn several lessons. Unfortunately, in recent weeks, I have also noticed that some Nigerians have been using the platform to spread alarming messages that are full of hate and incitement to violence, even when they still ask you to “pray”, apparently to the God they have created in their own image. But that is an issue for another day.

My family, the Igbokwe family of Uruagu Nnewi, Anambra State is one of the largest families in Igboland and Nigeria. It is made up of 19 families with each man having not less than three wives. My father had four wives with 23 surviving children. The family has become so large we now hardly recognize all Igbokwe kids.

The kind of clearance the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, received from the presidency will not only cast immense doubts on the sincerity of  Buhari’s fight against corruption, it is likely to define the image of this government, especially with the new administration in the U.S. It is not a question about the SGF’s innocence or culpability, but about how he was ‘’cleared’’ of other related allegations without convincing explanations.

The very idea or insinuation that President Buhari is anti North and anti Islam is to say the least, preposterous and mischievous. The truth is that those making the scathing attacks on the person and the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, believe that they are THE North.

We cannot, for the sake of some agreement and a rigid reading of the law, continue to short-change ourselves by not removing the hurdles in the way of off-grid solutions that will enable independent power plants set up, based on potential demand, to generate and distribute directly to customers without any go-between in form of a distribution company and an overbearing regulator. Starting out, Mr. Fashola seems to have gotten it wrong. From the outside, one would think his quick and wholesale embrace of what he met on ground in the power sector was rather disconcerting, even if one can see that he felt he needed to ensure continued investor confidence in the sector. Some of us who felt that his coming in would unravel the knotty problem that has almost grounded power supply were unnerved at his pat-on-the-shoulder approach.

Can Nigeria overcome corruption? Will Nigeria survive corruption? The optimistic, overconfident Nigerian who offered me a “no shaking yes” to both questions was only able to do so because he successfully outed me as I tried to remain incognito and maintain a low profile at the hotel pool in Lagos. Retreating incognito to a hotel in Lagos to assess our war front strategies in matters Nigeriana is something I often do with Omoyele Sowore.

Lai Mohammed, in true manifestation of his name, told a lie, when he scolded the advocacy group Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) by saying that their use of ‘impudent’ language should “should have been reserved for those who did nothing in the first 500 days of the girls’ abduction”.

I have very vivid memories of my last visit to The Gambia. This was in 2013 when President Goodluck Jonathan paid a two-day visit to the country.  In the course of that visit, President Jonathan commissioned the new Chancery of the Nigerian Embassy in Banjul, and also met with the Nigerian community, in addition to the usual bilateral meetings. Nigeria and The Gambia have very strong cultural and diplomatic relations.

Soon after the peaceful transition of power from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in the US, Gambia’s crisis was also resolved without a single gunshot. The embattled President Yahya Jammeh appeared on national TV announcing his decision “to relinquish the mantle of leadership”. Jammeh’s decision to step down was not only important to his own people, as he effectively decided not to push the country into bloodshed to retain power, but it also set an important precedent in Africa for a peaceful transition of power after a decades-long dictatorship.

I’ve written many times on the tenor of our discourse as Nigerians that one might begin to sound like a broken record. But the problem persists that one is forced to ask again, “What ails us so much?” It’s as if we are wired differently that our public debate, if we can still call it that, is filled with abuse, falsehood, and derogatory comments. The emergence of social media wherein every silly person with a smartphone and data can just post nonsense and otherwise respectable individuals will follow suit without pausing a little to question or query such has also not helped at all. Granted that societies evolve, serious Nigerians must be wondering when we are going to have more rigour in our public discourse.

According to federal Nigeria propaganda, last Tuesday’s bombing by a Nigeria Air Force jet of an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Rann, Borno State, was an “accident”. It was not. The death toll, about 70, could rise to over 100, officials said of the attack, in which 200 others were injured.

The Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) is doing some things right, such as the effort to curb overhead expenditures and to be more frugal than past administrations, but then they are also doing many things wrong. There is a reluctance to completely break from the past and embrace significant economic reforms, even when our present predicament clearly warrants same.

Gambians are our West African brothers and sisters who deserve our help in their hour of need. I get that. But no one can truly help the other when they are themselves in need of help when they are wracked by internal turmoil. President Buhari has no business being in Gambia’s business while his country burns. Imagine for a moment that Nigeria’s current president were a man called Goodluck Jonathan (or, for that matter, any southern Christian), and the military “mistakenly” dropped a bomb on hapless internally displaced Boko Haram victims, killing scores of them and critically injuring many more.Imagine again that such a president didn’t deem it worth his while to visit the state where this grievous tragedy happened but instead chose to go to another country to resolve the country’s political differences. What would we northern Muslims be saying by now?

The recent news about the arrival in markets around Lagos state of “Lake Rice”, a harvest of an agricultural business relationship between Lagos and Kebbi states is indeed heart-warming. The “Lake” bit in the brand name “Lake Rice” is said to be an acronym derived from an amalgamation of the first two letters in the names of the partners – “La” from Lagos and “Ke” from Kebbi state.

Friday the 20th of January 2017, President Donald J. Trump was officially recognised as the ruler of the free world. However you feel about him, like him or not, he must be respected and if not, feared. So I penned a thread of sorts on my twitter handle (@eadewunmi), my thoughts swinging between my admiration and reverence for the American democratic tradition and the unquestionable sense of patriotism that the new POTUS exudes and flashes of fear, lest this man fails — God forbid — and sadness caused by the fact that Nigeria has been mostly unfortunate to find leaders, who on the contrary act as though our nation is indebted to them.

There is a prank I usually play on my security guy. Anytime I am out of town, I call him regularly to ask about the power situation. He would regale me with tales of how we are burning diesel everyday because power supply is either completely nil or limited to a few hours per day. I will tell him not to worry, that things will change when I return. And truly, power supply always improves whenever I return. He will marvel at the co-incidence, and I will joke: the minister of power is my friend; I tell him when I am not around and also tell him when I return; so that is why you always see a difference. He will laugh in a way that shows he doesn’t believe me.

As some of the most disagreeable voices on and off the floor of the senate had threatened when the National Assembly was on recess, the so-called red chamber, on resumption, made good the recurrent ominous assertions by these elements. In a move that seemed like the senate was being propelled by a vengeful demon, Ali Ndume was removed as the senate leader. To say the least, his ouster had nothing to do with due process. It was a classic clinical act laced with all the ingredients of perfidy for which the current senate is notorious.

I may have lost my sanity at some point this week. This is one explanation for why I think the “accidental” bombing of Nigerian citizens by the Nigerian military is a very serious event in our Nigerian experience whereas other people seem to be calm enough about it. Another (and longer) explanation is that “other people” are simply irrational. Considering that, in the last four weeks alone, hundreds of Nigerians have been killed from attacks in Southern Kaduna and continuing Boko Haram violence, I would say there is enough reason to panic. If you dare, add these casualties of armed conflict to those who are still dying from road accidents, armed robberies, urban and domestic violence, illness and diseases, and even starvation.

President Muhammadu Buhari wants to intervene in The Gambia to prevent a breakdown of law and order which will lead to a humanitarian crisis. The Gambia has a population of 1.8 million people, while Kaduna has a population of 6 million people of which over 2 million of those are in Southern Kaduna.

“Every person in Ghana, whatever his race, place of origin, political opinion, colour, religion, creed, or gender, shall be entitled to the fundamental human rights and freedoms of the individual contained in this chapter but subject to respect for the rights and freedoms of others and for public interest…” The Ghanaian Constitution, Section 12 (2)

The new media have been abuzz with the news that former President Jonathan was invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration, while President Buhari was ignored. Interestingly, Jonathan — who didn’t attend Obama’s second inauguration in 2013 – is now being portrayed as a new bride.

Those skilled in psychoanalysis could not have missed the telltale hint. Newspaper images we saw of Yahya Jammeh receiving ECOWAS emissaries at the Banjul airport last Friday clearly depicted acute weight loss, accentuated by a distant look on his face. Really, it would have been humanly impossible to be haunted at home and heckled from outside like Jammeh in the past seven weeks and remain unruffled.

The release of chief Onanefe lbori, former Gov of Delta state from a UK prison where, he was unjustly jailed after he,(under duress) pleaded guilty to money laundering charges without trial, has generated a lot of buzz in the media.

For the past two weeks, I have stayed glued to the television watching with fascination tinged with envy, the American Senate confirmation hearings for cabinet nominees. The quality of what I have seen and listened to has reinforced my belief that our politicians are not ready for the challenge of nation building and more depressingly, our own “Congress”, the National Assembly, is a joke. Our senators are a bunch of amateurs, totally out of depth.

As it is now, The Gambia is under emergency rule as declared by its president of 22 years, Yahya Jammeh. The emergency rule has become necessary in the estimation of Jammeh, following his decision to challenge the outcome of the country’s December 1, 2016 election in which Adama Barrow was declared winner.

I’ve known for a while that Nigeria was in sorry shape, but not even that knowledge prepared me for a side of the country I saw when I arrived on January 3 for a ten-day visit. The last time I traveled by road from Lagos to my home state of Anambra was 2002, when my wife and I were Fulbright fellows teaching in Nigeria for a year. On this recent visit, I had little choice but to go by road. Friends and relatives had warned me that flights from Lagos to Enugu were prone, at best, to interminable delays, at worst to incessant cancellations owing to the harmattan. The best bet, I was told, was to make the trip by road. So my younger brother and I hired a Toyota Siena, one of the most popular vehicles in Nigeria for long commutes.

Well-meaning Nigerians have advised government to deal with the prevailing multiple foreign exchange rates. The reason is not far-fetched: multiple exchange rates encourage ‘round tripping’ and discourage real production. A manufacturer who gets a dollar at N315 and knows he could sell it at N497 down the street might be tempted to leave real production and become a currency dealer.

Last Friday, leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) demonstrated an uncommon resolve when, following their meeting with a recalcitrant Yahya Jammeh, they asked Mr Adama Barrow to move with the Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to Monrovia. It was from the Liberian capital, according to an impeccable source, that Barrow was ferried to Senegal despite the tragedy that struck back home with the dog bite that would claim the life of his 8-year old son, Habibu.