Clay Richie

On Tuesday, President Muhammadu Buhari declared his assets in fulfillment of Section 140 subsection 1 of the 1999 constitution. The section reads, “A person elected to the office of President shall not begin to perform the functions of that office until he has declared his assets and liabilities as prescribed in this Constitution and he has taken and subscribed the Oath of Allegiance and the oath of office prescribed in the Seventh Schedule to this Constitution.”

Anyone thinking they can stop the rise of electric cars by ignoring it or wishing it away is burying his or her head in the sand like an ostrich and hoping that others do not see them.‬ Electric cars are the future. There is no stopping them. It is not enough to be up to date in this game. We have to be up to tomorrow. The era of the internal combustion engine is gone. And it is now a case of if you can’t beat them, join them, because the only way we can beat them is by immediate local production and exportation to the world of petrol cars that are cheaper in the long run and more environmentally friendly than electric cars.

There is no objection here to the inauguration of President Muhammadu Buhari as President two days ago; given the verdict of INEC after the last general elections. There is also no objection to the legal steps being taken by those who are challenging the INEC verdict. That is the beauty of democracy and we applaud it, to the extent that its processes are followed. But there is an objection in principle here to any action or policy initiatives of the government, the President or his proxies that may not serve wider, long term, national interests. In this regard, and especially since there is the suggestion of continuity in the just-inaugurated government, Mr. President may wish to advert his attention to some matters of state to which one may be justified in raising some mild objections.

When President Muhammadu Buhari is sworn in on Wednesday for a second consecutive democratic term in office, it will be a low-key affair: no pomp or pageantry, no retinue of world leaders. In practice, this is due to Buhari’s admittedly smart decision to officially recognise June 12 — rather than May 29 — as Nigeria’s Democracy Day in honour of MKO Abiola, the acclaimed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, who was denied his mandate by military dictator Ibrahim Babangida, and eventually died on the very last day of his four years in detention.

A new Nigeria will emerge within the next four years.  That’s my prediction. Shall we have a better country or not? All I know is that the situation will not be pleasant, just as it isn’t now. Between 2019 and 2023, the majority of Nigerians will, finally, begin to face reality and return to where they should have been much earlier.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court sent a strong statement to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as well as the entire political class in Nigeria. In declaring ‘wasted’ the votes secured by APC candidates in gubernatorial, national and state assembly elections in Zamfara, the message is simple: Only when rules and regulations governing elections are binding on political parties and critical stakeholders can Nigerians begin to repose confidence in the system.

Way back in the 60’s and 70’s in Lagos, Discos – short for Discotheques- were the places to be on Friday nights when the weekend spell of fun and entertainment took off  in earnest. At the Disco parties and clubs, you really let off steam, gyrating wildly to the heavy bass and percussive beats of recorded pop music.

PROTOCOLS I am greatly honoured to have been asked to deliver this year’s Inauguration Lecture. The Kaduna Inauguration Lecture of 2015 was delivered by the late, great Professor Pius Adesanmi. His address was titled: “El Rufai and the Challenge of Building Kaduna in a Day With One Kobo.” He concluded his address with the words “To be continued.” Before we continue, may I please seek the indulgence of His Excellency the Governor of Kaduna State for us all to rise and observe a moment’s silence in honour of the memory of Professor Pius Adebola Adesanmi.

On Friday, May 24, 2019, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) raided the headquarters of newly listed telecommunications company, MTN Nigeria Communications Plc in Lagos. Prior to this, the EFCC had a day before, on the 23rd of May, sent a letter to the telecoms giant requesting information and documentation related to its listing of its shares by introduction on the premium board of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE).

If Nigerian governors were transparent in the utilization of Local government allocations by bringing development to the grassroots, President Muhammadu Buhari won’t have pushed for financial autonomy for local governments and Nigerians won’t have supported it too.

“Our people have witnessed bad leadership, especially in the ‎last eight years. It will be a disaster if we do not save this situation.” These were the exact words prophetically uttered by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Yakubu Dogara, on December 10, 2015, when the outgoing governor of Bauchi State, Barrister Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar, visited him in the National Assembly. The Speaker had, few months before then, paid a similar visit to the governor in Bauchi.

President Obasanjo’s remarks about an on-going ‘islamization and fulanization’ process at a Church of Nigeria event in Delta state and a deed in that direction on the part of the Buhari administration by announcing a new radio station for the Fulani formed the major item of public discourse over the last week. You may also count a few goofy statements on this and that but everyone already knows what to expect when it comes to Lai Mohammed.

I stand with PMB on the issue of true federalism. This country has to give every component part a sense of belonging, inclusiveness and responsibility. Since 1999 on the return of civil rule our democratic system has strived to grant every part of the country equal access to political leadership, sometimes it is disputed on the altar of merit. Arguable as it maybe it is overlooked that a sense of shared destiny and stability are enthroned—a necessary condition to build a united country.

In Nigeria, governments come and go, but each one outpaces the other in impunity, non-performance, corruption and incompetence.  Before the administration of President Buhari that of Goodluck Jonathan was knocked as the archetypal highhanded, clueless, corrupt and wasteful government.

I must say that Bunmi Lawson is someone that I appreciate among the young generation of Nigerian women who do a lot in their various spaces. Bunmi ran FATE Foundation and moved on to run ACCION Microfinance Bank through which she achieved a lot in financial inclusion and now, she is the pioneer in the sector of education finance and every time I see people like you, I like to celebrate.

I have heard and read about Elite Consensus and how it has been used at different epochs from time immemorial to save a society. In many countries of the world, the elite across the divides have had to work to change course of history and fortune of their nations for good. In South Africa, it was the elite Consensus that ended apartheid in 1990. It was elite consensus that ended slave trade and colonialism at different times in history.

I have this hunch that by the time President Muhammadu Buhari leaves office after his second term, there may either be no Nigeria as properly so called or the nagging questions of our existence would have led to the ultimate violent resolution of our identity and leadership crises. Two issues that cropped up during the week that just ended cemented this haunch of mine.

Your Excellency, I want to seize this opportunity to wish you the best of the Ramadan season as you prepare to be inaugurated for your second term in office. May the lessons of Ramadan — especially the aspects of sacrifice and service to God and humankind — guide your next steps as the leader of this potentially great country called Nigeria. I have many complaints about your first four years in office, some of which I have written about in this space, but I would rather let the past be gone and hope for a new chapter as you renew your mandate on May 29. But I also have many things to say ahead of the next four years, some of which I will be writing about in the coming weeks.

The Nigerian Blogosphere and conventional news media was replete with pictures and reports indicating that Judges of Islamic Orientation went on a Courtesy Call on the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria ,H.E. Muhammedu Buhari ,to break the Ramadan Fast .

Those who were young (men-about-town) in the 80s will remember the 1979 hit track by McFadden & Whitehead, titled Ain’t no stopping us now. The lyrics goes thus:

Comparison between public conduct elsewhere and what obtains in Nigeria can sometimes be awkward, especially because it can be mistaken to suggest that we can’t be up to any good. That’s not only incorrect, such moral equivalence is unfair to millions of Nigerians who are doing their damn best in their quiet spaces.

If President Muhammadu Buhari truly desires to leave Nigeria much better than he met it, he would need to get more hands-on and visionary as he takes office for a second term in six days’ time.

Nigerians have long taken pride in being a large nation.“We are very grateful to Britain for giving us Nigeria. It is a great thing to belong to a big country. There is always an unspoken contempt for small countries in international affairs, and we are happy to be citizens of a big country,” said Obafemi Awolowo in 1958. Nigeria’s size and population as guarantor of global gravitas has since become entrenched in the national psyche. Especially as numbers remain the essential foundation of our claim to the “Giant of Africa” status. In terms of sheer natural wealth for instance, countries like Congo and South Africa are no lesser than Nigeria.

Sometime in September 1984, my dad and his pregnant wife drove to Abeokuta with my older brother in the car, pretending to be on a family getaway. The real purpose of their trip however, was to buy the only brand of baby food that my then 18 month-old brother would eat. Just under a year ago, a certain General Muhammadu Buhari had seized power from Shehu Shagari in a coup, and one of his signature policies was to establish a top-down price control directive that penalized traders and shop owners for selling certain items above the government-directed price.

Incontestably, Imo State which prides as the Eastern Heartland is in ruins in so many facets. Her ruinous status today, is occasioned by the eight horrible years of misrule by the administration of the outgoing Governor Rochas Okorocha.

Anyone seeking to understand the concept of a tortured soul only needs to pay close attention to Rivers State Governor, Mr. Nyesom Wike, whose every action in recent days seems to provoke his demons instead of pacifying them.

The most important of life’s battles is the one we fight daily in the silent chambers of the soul—David O. McKay Following the death in March 2017 of a medical doctor who jumped headlong into the lagoon off Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos, I argued on this page that because some wounds can easily be covered up, we do not always know what people around us are going through or what action they might take when pushed to the edge.

Soon after the 2019 presidential/National Assembly elections, the battle for the seats of presiding officers for the ninth Assembly began in earnest, with elected lawmakers on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), interested in one position or the other, publicly making their intentions known.

There is always this intriguing thing about small men: they almost always love big fights. They fish for giants to wrestle and subdue. Every Goliath that falls at their feet adds to the inches of their petite heights. That is why they won’t stop going to war. And when they come with big brains, they present as bombs, very lethal. Kaduna State governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, has brawn and brain in tumultuous excess. He recently told ‘freedom fighters’ in Lagos to prepare N2 billion as sacrifice money. That is what the Nigerian gnomes would need to bring out five million voters to defeat and retire Bola Tinubu as the Capo, the ultimate mafia boss of Lagos and its satellites.

It was gratifying to read that Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in this year’s presidential elections is demanding an apology from a presidential aide who claimed that the former vice president is on a security watch list in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

According to the Director-General of the debt management office,Pauline Oniha,Nigeria’s debt profile as at December 31st 2018 was N24.387tn. Up over N3trn from the N21.725tn official figure of 2017.To better illustrate how worrisome the state of our finances are,our debt profile stood at a cumulative sum of N7.8tn when Buhari assumed office in May 2015 and in just a month of Buhari being in charge,that figure had blown by N5.4tn to N12.12tn. Outside all the grammar and arithmetic,i am no different from my old grand mother whose first reaction would be-“Where did all this money go?”.

By now, you have probably seen the clip of Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, complaining about how Nigerians import pizza from London on their smartphones. The claim may have been ludicrous, but the minister was echoing a much more popular sentiment: that Nigeria’s import obsession is bad for the economy.

Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the Lagos State governor-elect and some of the other governors-elect across the country have been busy making promises and beating their chests out of what seems like an epileptic fit of triumphalism. I urge caution. The new wife is always tempted to put down the old wife – that is what African tradition and culture tells us and in modern politics or what we call democracy, this anthropological and cultural side of our nativist politics often shows up to remind us of the residual character of African democracy.

This is the story of the first oil war, which was fought in the 19th century, in the area that became Nigeria. All through the 19th century, palm oil was highly sought-after by the British, for use as an industrial lubricant for machinery. Remember that Britain was the world’s first industrialised nation, so they needed resources such as palm oil to maintain that.

After 27 years struggle, great history was recorded when the National Assembly ratified June 12 as Democracy Day in Nigeria. For 27 years we struggled, we spoke, we appealed, we begged, we asked and called the attention of the powers that be since 1999 that May 29 former President Obasonjo chose as Democracy Day is a fraud, null and void, and of zero consequence. We said so because nothing significant was attached to the date by those who sold the idea to Chief Obasonjo.

“Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles; the conduct of public affairs for private advantage” – Ambrose Bierce As is usual in Nigeria, the word ‘interest’ has been bastardised but I will come back to that shortly. Take the expression ‘PR’, which has acquired such notoriety that the actual Public Relations practitioners think twice before using that expression to describe what they do.

Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, Kano State governor and one of only three state deputy governors since 1999 that somehow succeeded in taking over from their principals, whenever he manages to make the news, does so mostly for the wrong reasons. Four examples would suffice. One, it wasn’t enough that Ganduje fell out with Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the governor made it impossible for his erstwhile principal, the man he served as deputy for eight years and ministerial aide for four years, to even visit his constituents – the police had to advise Kwankwaso to stop visiting Kano in order to avert violence.

What can Igbo nation gain if an Igbo becomes the president of Nigeria in 2023? Nothing as a people!

I always hesitate to use the “R” word because I don’t understand how it really works, but a lot of Nigerians have been talking about “revolution” for a while. They say Nigeria will experience a revolution at a point in time, given the way the society has been going: the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer; the fat getting fatter, the lean getting leaner. One definition goes like this: “Revolution is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organisation which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due to perceived oppression — political, social, economic — or political incompetence.”

No banking or finance professional who listened to that audio would think money was stolen. What is however clear is that our CBN has a very big hole which it is finding difficult to cover.

Nigeria’s economy is stressed. Several performance indicators and ratings point to its parlous inclination. But no performance indicator is as stark as everyday realities that confront the general populace. Beyond the gross erosion of the disposable income, many Nigerians are presently unable to afford three square meals and medical care.

For anyone who cares to listen, the Governor of Kogi state Yahaya Bello will proudly thump his chest and say he is the godson of the president, Muhammadu Buhari. Since he assumed office, Bello made his subservient ways to please the president very overt. He is not ashamed to be at the beck-and-call of the president even when his duties are not needed. Bello somehow manages to worm his way through, positioning himself as the true son of the president. His frequent visits to Aso Villa was once seen as a political move to seek the hand of the president's daughter in marriage. As a Muslim who is already married, his intentions are by no means illegal.

To the perceptive, one of the puzzling changes to governance in the last 20 years is the progressive weakening of the all-powerful-state and the rise of groups, businesses and personages, who wield more influence and possess more economic resources than so many countries. For instance, Walmart- the largest retailer in the world, generated a revenue of over USD 510 billion in 2018 which is far more than the amount Nigeria and her 180 million hardworking citizens made that year. It is not shocking when one puts in perspective the fact that Alhaji Aliko Dangote in 2018 earned more money than some states in Nigeria.

Politics aside, most poor people in the North of Nigeria have been fed the media impression that the current president, Muhammadu Buhari, is a man that likes transparency and fiscal responsibility. In local parlance, they called him “mai gaskiya”, the man of honesty.

Nigeria has a smaller national budget than Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and South Africa. All these countries have fewer citizens, yet significantly more money to spend on them. While Nigeria’s 2019 budget amounts to $29 billion, South Africa, with a population almost 4 times smaller, will spend $130 billion. Egypt has a $90 billion budget with 100 million people. Elsewhere, countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam have larger budgets than Nigeria. No one considers these nations “rich”. Yet, among Nigerians, there persists a stubborn myth that Nigeria is a wealthy country. Who planted this idea and why does it survive?

The Sarkin Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, always wanted to be to local. Even in his heyday as governor of the Central Bank, he said he was often amused when public office holders fought for appointment as ministers, state governors, ambassadors or for any position at all on the big stage.

President Muhammadu Buhari is under obligation to announce a new Federal cabinet. The tenure of his present team of aides, including Ministers, Special Advisers, Senior Special Assistants and Special Assistants automatically expires on May 29, 2019. Whereas the President took six months to announce many of these appointments in 2015, the convention and the law is that those appointments are for a tenure of four-years – in line with the Chief Executive’s own tenure and once that tenure ends, the appointments, due to the effluxion of time, end automatically.

Legalize it Don’t criticize it Legalize it, yeah yeah And I will advertise it Some call it tamjee Some call it the weed Some call it marijuana Some of them call it ganja Never mind, got to legalize it It’s good for the flu Good for asthma Good for tuberculosis Even numara thrombosis Go to legalize it Don’t criticize it… –Peter Tosh, the late Jamaican reggae musician

“Only the Almighty can judge the case of a person who claims to have shared a piece of meat for two people equally, even though he sliced the beef with his own teeth.” – African Proverb

With the recent issuance of a certificate of return to billionaire politician, Prince Ned Nwoko of Delta North Senatorial District by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), despite a pending appeal before the Court of Appeal in Abuja, and having been served a stay of execution on the judgement of the Federal High Court, Abuja, it is clear that the electoral body has been unduly influenced by the billionaire politician who prides himself in using his money to achieve whatever he wants.