Clay Richie

On December 12, 2013, I woke up to Olusegun Obasanjo’s ‘Before it is too late’; a caustic letter to former President Goodluck Jonathan. In the 18-page missive, Ebora Owu diced Jonathan like a sushi chef.

Fellow Nigerians, I don’t know about you, but I find the cynicism of many Nigerians very strange and sometimes distressing and depressing. If you’re a social media addict like me, you must have experienced the horror of reading some banal arguments on some platforms. Believe me, it is no longer funny! No surprise that some wonder wonder legislator has decided that hate speech must not only be legislated out of existence but made a capital offence so that horrible death awaits the purveyors of such filth, not minding the constitutional guarantee of Nigerians to freedom of speech and expression.

In a very recent book I co-authored – Urbanisation and Crime in Nigeria (Palgrave Macmillan 2019 with Ojo, Adegbola), we made a bold assertion that Nigeria is presently at an accelerated stage of its urban transition, with more than half of its total population now residing in urban centres. Between 2018 and 2050, it is projected that 189 million more people would have been added to Nigeria’s urban population. Approximately seven in 10 Nigerians will live in cities by 2050 in search of what we described as the Nigerian urban dream – the pursuit of a better life.

Not many Nigerians will pick bones with Senator Sabi Abdullahi (representing Niger North Senatorial district) for sponsoring a private bill aimed at 'prohibiting hate speeches and (for) other related matters'. Many discerning Nigerians have been alarmed at the crippling enthronement and insidious effects of hate speech on our body politics, since the acrimonious electioneering campaigns of 2007 presidential and National Assembly elections. The cancer of hate speech took an upswing to the dirty rafters in the actions and statements of political combatants in the civilian power-shift tsunami of 2015.

Ordinarily, the expulsion of a 300 Level Accounting student of Babcock University over a viral sex video should be stale by now, but for the expulsion of another set of undergrads by the Federal University of Technology, Akure barely a week after , thus bringing the Babcock matter on the front burner again. Apart from the fact that the two institutions meted out similar punishment to their erring students, both offences leading to the students’ expulsion were committed off-campus.

I will open this piece with a simple truth: the continued incarceration of Omoloye Sowore and other prisoners of conscience is a prelude of how Nigerian democracy will die. Unknown to the flatterers that are happy with the continued detention of Sowore, they are not good companions and advocates for President Buhari and Prof Yemi Osinbajo. It is these praise singers that will ruin these two. The longer the Nigerian Government keeps Sowore in detention, the more the image of President Buhari is damaged and rubbished as a reformed democrat. It should be that simple.

Across many cultures, a witch is often a poor old widow who turns into a bird or other dangerous creature in search of innocent people to harm as they slept in the dead of night. Nobody would associate with a known witch or wizard!

In 2006, Professor Jerry Gana—who started as Minister between 1999 and 2003—served as Political Adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo. But during the period when many of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) politicians tried to outdo themselves on the ‘Third Term’ agenda, Gana stayed out of the fray. That did not go unnoticed by the then PDP Board of Trustees Chairman, Chief Tony Anenih of blessed memory. At a time like this, it is worth recalling a very instructive conversation between Anenih and Gana which was first published on this page some 13 years ago.

Let Us Disapprove For The Right Reasons The disapproval of the social media and hate speech bills by a lot of Nigerians is quite understandable. The ignominy with which the Buhari administration has repeatedly made a mockery of the rule of law has made it almost impossible to trust him. But that is really as far as it goes. If you have any other excuse for being sceptical about thes

2023 may well give Nigerians the chance to choose between progress and status quo, but going by the way citizens are reacting to some names that are already gaining traction in the circle of presidential hopefuls, it can be assumed that in the next four years and probably beyond, the country will still be orbiting around the question of whose “turn it is” to (mal)administer it.

There is often the assumption, mistaken in my view, that there should be far less security and other challenges any time elections are taking place in only one or two states of the federation. It is easy to argue that we need not deployment tens of thousands of police and other security personnel on such occasions. But is that correct? Is it actually a waste of resources and manpower, as well as a pretense that the people so deployed are useful in determining the extent of security and the integrity of election outcomes? Are we right in inferring that the repeated cases of electoral misconduct, and even untold mayhem, which followed some off-season elections, including in particular the recent one in Kogi State, justify the view that the extra security on such occasions is unnecessary?

OPEN LETTER TO THE ALL PROGRESSIVES CONGRESS (APC) NATIONAL WORKING COMMITTEE (NWC) I write this letter not because I am a member or sympathizer of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), but as a patriotic Nigerian who believes in upholding national interest above sectional or party interests. It is not in doubt that as the ruling party, whatever goes on in the APC could have far reaching consequences on the country. Nigeria belongs to all of us and it is our duty to join hands together to build the nation, hence my undertaking to write this treatise.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE SENATE PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA- AHMED LAWAN Dear sir, I am well delighted to write this warm letter to you at this critical moment of our national life. Since you were hand picked and made the puppet Senate President, this is my very first time of writing any form of commentary concerning the rubber stamp senate which you are superintending. Moreover, that will not in anyway prevent me from congratulating you as the Senate President inspite of all the shameful intrigues that crowned your emergence at the helm of affairs in the National Assembly. Notwithstanding, congratulations for accepting in the first place to be a legislative turncoat.

Tomorrow, November 27, 2019, it would be exactly one year since the Governor of Osun State, Adegboyega Oyetola was sworn in as Governor of Osun State. The circumstances of his emergence as Governor were quite controversial at the time, especially as the Osun Gubernatorial election was analyzed in the context of the then forthcoming general elections in February/March 2019.

My dear friend and brother Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, as courageous and truthful as ever, is absolutely right. I would however go a step further by adding that President Muhammadu Buhari himself, Bola Tinubu, Nasir El-Rufai, Rotimi Amaechi, Adams Oshiomole, Yemi Osinbajo and a good number of other leaders in the Federal Government and/or the ruling party would no longer be with us either if the Bill had been in place between 2013 and 2015 because they would all have been hanged for their hateful words and inciting speeches.

You would not give him credit no matter what he does, would you? Let us cut the pretence. You simply want this administration to bumble: a foil for wanting your country to fail. So, the issue really is not about whether President Muhammadu Buhari is performing as a President or not. It is about your inability to overcome your own prejudice. The orchestrated babble and raising of unnecessary dust over the situations in Nigeria are just ways to deny this administration due credits for the commendable uplift being achieved in many areas of our national life.

“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Steven Biko (1946-1977) Steven Biko was a revolutionary whose anti-apartheid struggles helped to abolish the despicable regime. As a student, he was so brilliant that on some occasions, he was promoted over and above his peers. He actually jumped some classes as his teachers realised that he was a young man endowed with very high intelligence quotient. In 1966, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University Of Natal as a medical student. He was then the leader of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) which had both black and white students as members.

With less than a year to the governorship election in Edo state, there has begun an interplay of political forces as the dominant political parties – the all progressives congress and the people’s democratic party – commence a much needed house cleaning process for self re-positioning ahead of the election.

Before he was sworn in as president in May 2015, Muhammadu Buhari, without prompting from anybody, publicly told his immediate and extended family members to stand back from his incoming government. He even warned that any family member who used his name to peddle influence would face dire consequences.

It has been three months since Nigeria closed its land borders and to date there are few indications as to when they will open again. The country said it wants to reduce the smuggling of goods and stop illegal inflows of Asian rice and outflows of subsidised fuel. More fundamentally, Nigerian authorities justify the closure by the need to support the domestic agricultural sector and accelerate national productivity growth.

Fellow Nigerians, let me confess right away that I’m a realist. If you like, call me chicken-hearted or lily-livered. No worries. All I know is that I was taught many lessons by the wisdom of the ancients. Let me share a few of them with you. One. If we cannot move forward, we must know when to turn backwards. Two. If you have not yet grabbed the sword, you cannot risk asking what manner of death killed your Dad. Three. Even the Bible teaches us how to be meek and humble. “If your right cheek is slapped, turn the left cheek…” It may sound stupid to a lot of people but it might just save you a lot of headache.

Senator Mohammed Sani Musa’s anti-social media bill now making its way through Nigeria’s upper legislative chamber in the Senate is worse than a throwback to the worst years of Nigeria’s experience of military rule. It is a hubristic act of inter-generational warfare that must be resisted and defeated. A Senate comprising essentially an analogue generation, whose average age exceeds Nigeria’s life expectancy by about 30%, seeks to liquidate the only means of expression left for a digital generation whose analogue rulers have afflicted with little choice and no hope. A cross-party effort, this bill is evidence of how elite consensus in Nigeria, wherever it happens, is both self-serving and irresponsible. Rather than start a war that it cannot win, the Senate should be well advised to withdraw this bill and seek to influence digital content through good leadership and positive example. It can still do so.

It was Andrew Napolitano, a former US judge and now Fox News analyst who wrote sometime ago, at the height of claims that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) might have abused its powers by inserting a spy/spies in the Trump Campaign Organisation to gather intelligence about its contacts and interactions, that “liberty is rarely lost overnight. The wall of tyranny often begins with benign building blocks of safety — each one lying on top of a predecessor — eventually collectively constituting an impediment to the exercise of free choices by free people, often not even recognised until it is too late”.

Africa needs long-established support Looking at Africa and only pushing for aid is not in the interest of the everyday Africans. It is about the egos of the elites and latte intellectuals who believe they have the solutions to why the continent is still poor.

“Democracy depends on strong institutions and it’s about minority rights, checks and balances and freedom of speech.” Those are the words of former US President Barack Obama when he visited South Africa in June 2018.

I am in the middle of writing my LLM exams but I have been too horrified to concentrate because of the haunting thoughts about the news of a certain woman leader that was burnt alive, in her locked house by some thugs belonging to a rival political party in Kogi State.

Monitoring the shambolic electoral attempt in Kogi over the weekend reminded me of the evolution of the Buhari government. An attempt it was because nobody in his right frame of mind would define the charade as an election. The evidence is everywhere, on social and mainstream media; in the report of national and international observers and of course, the worst of it, the number of dead and injured. There was no election in Kogi. There was war. A war between the tested ideals of democracy and kakistocracy failing its every attempt at mimicking the concept of the universal definition of one man one vote. The charade in Kogi was one vote many bullets.

Defeat is an orphan. Nothing illustrates its orphanage status as vividly as the fate of two politicians involved in last week’s elections in Kogi and Bayelsa states: Senator Dino Melaye and Governor Seriake Henry Dickson.

What do you think will happen in Bayelsa and Kogi States this coming Saturday? The question was posed to me last week Monday by a prominent citizen who considered my political opinion to be of some value.

Can national security be guaranteed by an agreement with bandits, marauders and sundry predatory forces operating outside the bounds of rationality and preying upon the state? I think not. It is good governance, an enlightened citizenry and strong institutions of state that could create the right mix of variables to ensure sustainable national security.

Oh, Jonathan! On this historic day of your birth, what can I say about you that haven’t been said before now? With the exactitude of a Jewish Prophet and the specificity of an English Judge, you accurately predicted the naked tyranny that 15 million Nigerians would later get us into.

Of all the Chief Executives of the Nigerian Customs Service to date, none has been more powerful than Colonel Hameed Ibrahim Alli (rtd.), the sixty-four year old post graduate criminologist, from Dass Local Government Area of Bauchi State. On November 21, 1994, General Sani Abacha, GCFR, appointed him along with Justice Ibrahim Nadhi Auta, a Federal High Court Judge in Lagos and Justice Etowa Enyong Arikpo, a Judge in the Cross Rivers state High Court to try Ken Saro- Wiwa, Ledun Mitee, Barinom Kiobel, John Kpaniene and Baribor Berai in the aftermath of the Ogoni crisis in Rivers state. On August 22, 1996, the same General Abacha appointed him as the Military Governor of Kaduna state. He served as Governor till August 1998 following General Abacha’s death. On August 27, 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, appointed Colonel Ibrahim Hameed Alli, as the Comptroller General of Customs Service.

Last week, exactly a year before another round of gubernatorial contest in the ‘Heart Beat of the Nation’, it's shocking the entire Edo landscape boils with political tensions like Papua New Guinea jungle bristling with head hunters and primitive blood-curling human vampires.

In recent years, some of my friends have relocated to Europe or North America along with their family members. When another longstanding friend hinted he would be migrating to America soon, I tried to discourage him as I did other friends. “You’re making a mistake,” I told Udinny, a university teacher, as we chatted on WhatsApp recently. “We die here, failed economy or not.” I explained to him how, in 2006, I had won the American Visa Lottery but turned down the offer because I didn’t want to go into slavery by consent.

When, in October, President Muhammadu Buhari presented to the National Assembly the Appropriation Bill for 2020, he submitted along with the budget proposal as it is known, a Fiscal Strategy or Finance Bill, 2019. The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning has since then spoken about the importance of the Finance Bill, to the growth of the Nigerian economy. The stated objective is to promote fiscal equity, address problems with the prevailing taxation order, and reform existing taxation laws in line with global best practices.

A MATTER OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY DEMANDING OUR DEAR PRESIDENT BUHARI’S URGENT ACTION! “Re: $Billion Diaspora Remittances: Where Are The Dollars?” The above question was posed in an article in The PUNCH newspaper edition of September 9, 2019, by columnist Henry Boyo.

The 2007 general election conducted by INEC under the supervision of Maurice Iwu is, perhaps, one of the most fraudulent in Nigeria’s electoral history. Human Rights Watch said this about that election: ‘’Instead of guaranteeing citizens’ basic right to vote freely, Nigerian government and electoral officials actively colluded in the fraud and violence that marred the presidential polls.’’

Time and again, there are desperate calls not just by veterans but also by younger and discriminating practitioners about the compelling need to rescue journalism practice in Nigeria from obvious dereliction, continuous degenerative state of violation and steady slide into disrepute.

This is confession time: My pessimism about Nigeria is as huge as its expansive landscape. Like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, I believed that the beautiful Nigerian was either not yet born, born and died prematurely or will never be born at all. My experiential encounters with the Nigerian did not help matters. You meet countrymen who give you the impression that you could not find a good man in Nigeria. In virtually all sectors of the economy, distressing news is the order of the day. The politician is a mess, the journalist is a mess, the banker is a mess, the lecturer is a mess, the pastor is a mess, the Imam is a mess; and so on and so ad infinitum. So where is the good Nigerian? Is he buried in the womb of time or is he yet to unfurl?

The current generation of Nigerians is obviously progressing in the path threaded by our parents and the generation before us. That path led us to where we are today – i.e., penury, high level of illiterate citizens, religiosity without integrity and humanity, the highest level of corruption, a lawless country, and a teaming population of docile, uneducated youths. Today in Nigeria, we have in power an out-of-touch elitist ruling class always profiting from the commonwealth of Nigeria and its ruin.

How about this? By 2030 — that’s a little over 10 years from now — no Nigerian child will die from preventable diseases such as malaria, pneumonia and malnutrition; all children will receive quality basic education, and their parents will not have to be politicians or bankers; and discrimination against the girl-child will end. These are the big dreams of Save the Children, the UK-based charity that has operated in 16 Nigerian states since coming here in 2001. Clearly, these are tall orders in a country where 50% of girls who are 15 years and older are illiterate; where 32% of school-age children are on the streets; and where 104 out of 1000 children die before their fifth birthday.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which was proclaimed by the United Nations’ General Assembly in 1948,and adopted as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 1981 is a milestone document in the history of human rights.

Democracy is earning the power to govern through free, fair and credible elections. Nigeria is a democratic state, but the leadership recruitment process is largely undemocratic. Material and financial inducements determines victory, the security agencies are political, and the umpire lacks the capacity and will to conduct credible polls. Public sovereignty is departing the ballot for court as the 2019 general elections produced about a thousand petitions. Subjecting almost every electoral victory to judicial confirmation is making voting lose its essence. Like every human, judges are prone to errors as much as they have preference. Hence, their verdicts can’t always be a true reflection of the peoples will. Several mandates have been mistakenly or deliberately upturned. Parties and candidates must strive to end their contests at the polls, instead of the court.

Fellow Nigerians, let me say it has been a particularly hectic month for me. I have had to juggle a lot of things including pursuing my Fellowship, dealing with the business affairs of the Ovation Group, private media work, writing columns, charity work and attending a variety of functions and events. This has necessitated my travel between Oxford, Ghana, Rwanda, Germany, Amsterdam and Nigeria. I now totally understand what Chief Moshood Abiola meant by his popular saying “the bigger the head, the bigger the headache…”

Yes. Be alarmed. That is the whole idea. I have many cogent reasons for thinking this way but the most prominent is that there is no elite consensus to make the painful sacrifices that will lunge project Nigeria forward. Every group and every individual is holding on to their own advantages and in fact looking for more. As it type this, the unity and cohesion of this nation is broken, dangerously splintered and at the risk of melting down at any moment. If it does, we will all have ourselves to blame for it. But I know we are used to regrets. The history of the black man, especially Nigeria, is a history of negligence to do the right thing, and regrets afterwards.

Senator Bola Tinubu, the grand patriarch of APC has his wife in the 7th, 8th and 9th Senate; Senator Abba Bukar Ibrahim’s wife was in the 8th Assembly and she’s also in the 9th, while the Distinguished Senator spent 8 years as Governor of Yobe State;

Many Nigerians were taken aback on Tuesday, November 12 2019, when news filtered that the Hate Speech Bill, first introduced in March last year under the eighth Senate, passed the first hearing at the plenary. The Bill, entitled, “National Commission for the Prohibition of Hate Speeches (etc) Bill 2019, was sponsored by the Deputy Chief Whip of the Senate, Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, who also sponsored the Bill last year. Among other things, the Bill states that any person found guilty of any form of hate speech that results in the death of any person shall die by hanging upon conviction.The Bill also provides that:

I have bad news! It is evident there will be no election in Kogi on Saturday. I don’t foresee Arthur-Nzeribe type Association for Better Nigeria securing a midnight injunction to prevent the democratic process from taking place; that process would go ahead.

Last Saturday, the emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, stirred the hornet’s nest when he advocated punishment for parents who neglect their children by allowing them to roam aimlessly on the streets. Citing as an example the children recently abducted from Kano, the emir wondered whether this could happen in other parts of the country. “Now, make attempt to abduct a child in Onitsha and see if you will find one available. Is this not true? Do they leave their 3 to 4-year-old children roaming in the street begging?” asked the emir who spoke at his palace during the 2019 public campaign organised by League for Societal Protection Against Drug Abuse, (LESPADA).

In the countries that we like to hail as saner climes, the obsession is to ensure that food costs are kept low so that the vast majority of the population can afford it. In Nigeria, we are constantly told, from a position of arrogance, that we should “tighten our belts”, or “change our mindsets”.