Clay Richie

The meeting of the National Council of State is long overdue. The Council met last on January 22nd last year and discussed many issues especially the minimum wage. Although the Council has no executive power but its advisory role is important. The National Economic Council and the Council of State are the two bodies created by the Constitution to advise the President on specific matters.

If there is any lesson we have learnt from the past five weeks, it is how difficult it is to enforce a meaningful lockdown or social distancing in Nigeria. All over the country, wherever restrictions are imposed, the pushing and shoving that occurs during market hours have themselves become serious risk factors. Last Friday, two children were crushed to death in Taraba State following a stampede at Jalingo main market during the four hours (10am to 2pm) allotted for residents to stock household essentials. Many churches and mosques continue to remain open. And last week Monday,

On Monday, April 27, 2020, British oil and gas giant, BP, became the latest in a growing number of energy firms to declare a massive quarterly loss. Their loss was in the region of $4.4 billion dollars. Bear in mind that this was a conglomerate that posted a $2.6 billion profit in the corresponding quarter of 2019.

It has taken covid-19 for everyone to know that Nigeria is a failed state. In a matter of three or four months ahead, those who have been living in denial will have no cause to doubt what we’ve been saying for years. The nation’s economy has, for decades, been sustained by the informal sector. Now, the sector that is totally independent of government has been suppressed by covid-19 lockdown.

Our banks did not pay anything into the accounts of their customers, as evidence of goodwill to enable them cope with the lockdown and hardships imposed by the COVID 19 Pandemic. But they donated billions of naira to the federal government, to distribute as raw cash to the poor. The banks also did not reduce, or eliminate, certain online charges. Instead, they made their customers to pay more at ATM machines. Machines that hitherto dispensed a maximum of forty thousand per Naira per transaction now dispense a maximum of N10,000 per transaction. The person who wants to withdraw N40,000 must thus make multiple withdrawals and pay four times of what he used to pay. That is their understand of Corporate Social Responsibility at a time like this: donating money in order to be called a good boy/girl by the government, while enthroning economic demony elsewhere.

‘Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things.’ – C.S. Lewis

How exactly is the lockdown helping to halt the spread of coronavirus in Nigeria? Or put another way, how is the Buhari regime which announced the lockdown in three locations, Lagos, Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), ensuring that the measure unleashed is at least achieving a reasonable percentage of the purpose for which it was declared?

The global economy is in a tailspin. IMF and the World Bank have both predicted a contraction of the global economy with developing economies likely to be worst affected. This situation is the direct result of the menace of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the energy crisis that the world faces. With many businesses and factories on lockdown, with the tourism and travel industry playing possum, the world is confronted with a demand and supply shock, and a financial and economic shock in addition to a catalytic global health crisis, the end of which no one knows. Commodity dependent countries like Nigeria, Algeria and Angola, in the absence of buffers to deal with endogenous and exogenous shocks are in dire straits. The Micro, Small and Medium Scale Sector is also facing special difficulties.

Before the lockdown in Ogun, Lagos, and the Federal Capital Territory was announced four weeks ago, I drove to Ibadan for a special assignment and for some personal engagement. Strangely, I did not encounter a single police officer between Lagos and Ibadan — perhaps everyone was preparing for the eventual lockdown. This is unusual for the busiest road in Nigeria.

We have never experienced a phenomenon similar to COVID-19 in our lifetime. In a matter of weeks, the virus has spread to 210 countries and territories and has rocked global economies in its wake.

I knew Abba Kyari. No, we didn't school together at St Paul's Zaria, Warwick or Cambridge. We didn't work in the same law firm or media house, never exchanged text messages, nor did he buy me books. He wasn't my bestman nor my children's godfather. No, we weren't friends, nor served on the same boards, we never worked as colleagues, ever. I didn't know him 4 decades ago, but from September 2015 when he was appointed chief of staff to the president. This doesn't mean I didn't know him enough. I did.

“Be fearful, when others are greedy… Be greedy, when others are fearful” – Warren Buffet Alright. Gloves off. Enough already. I have refused to add COVID to the title above because we have seen and read too many COVID-titled articles already. Everyone has an opinion on that subject and justifiably too. But the time for play is over. Equally, the time for fear and hedging is over. I will say it like it is in this article and let anyone’s ox be gored. Nigerians are simply not dying due to this disease, and for whatever reason.

The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is still on the war path, ravaging the land and killing people. However, we are consoled by the fact that whatever has a beginning will surely have an end and the human race will continue to endure from generation to generation. In challenging times, empathy matters; we have to remain resilient, hopeful, confident, optimistic and thoughtful about the future. The global economy has been severely impacted by COVID-19 and we must therefore adapt our normal lives to the significant changes taking place. What does the foreseeable future look like? We cannot tell but English Naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), famous for his Theory of Evolution, said, “Those who survive are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change”.

Historically, in March, 1520, a single smallpox carrier landed in Mexico like a whirlwind and at the time I am x-raying, Central America had no trains, buses or even donkeys, yet in a few months, it killed one third of their population!

Perhaps the biggest COVID-19 debate in Nigeria today is: should the lockdown be lifted? Residents of Lagos state and the federal capital territory (FCT) have been under a lockdown since March 30. The aim is to slow the spread of the virus by limiting public interactions. It was also to allow those who had contracted the virus to stay at home and manifest symptoms. It typically takes between five and 14 days for symptoms to show up. The federal government also wanted to test more Nigerians during the period. Lagos and FCT were picked because they had most of the confirmed cases. Ogun state was included five days later. Many governors have also locked down their states.

The death of Abba Kyari, former Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, has elicited a great deal of controversy, but the posterity demands that the history of our leaders bears the truth.

A historian once argued that even the most cataclysmic events hardly change the course of history. The coronavirus pandemic is certainly one of the most catastrophic events of our time. In terms of how many lives it has claimed, it would not be the most deadly the world had seen. But aided by the very force of our modernity, globalisation, COVID -19, is perhaps the first ever truly global pandemic that mankind has suffered. Whether it would alter the course of human history in any fundamental ways or not would be seen in the months ahead. One thing that is certain however is that so much will change going forward, and we all better brace up for the impacts. A few decades from now, COVID-19 will not be remembered for how many people it killed, but how it has redefined international relations and triggered the transformation of political and economic norms within nations.

From Johannesburg to Lagos, Cairo to Dakar, Kinshasa to Kigali, Nairobi to Accra, etc., the debate on how Africa should respond to the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is raging. At an African regional policy platform, I had expressed some of these (personal) views some weeks ago but I have been encouraged by most members to circulate them in Africa beyond the platform.

Nigeria is an impoverished country. In fact, the country has never been rich – in the economic sense of the word. The assumptions of wealth have always been hyphenated to the abundance of crude oil and other natural resources. But these alone do not make the country rich. As a matter of fact, the exploitation and expropriation of these resources by the thieving elite have only made the country poorer – and of course, the poverty capital of the world.

COVID-19 has gone for Nigeria’s jugular. Yet again, President Buhari is not fighting back with equal ferocity. This should not be surprising. The President has, in his nearly six years of being in office, sufficiently demonstrated his reluctance to take decisive actions posthaste.

The world is bracing for a massive hit to the global economy in the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Experts have warned of a US$1-2 trillion shortfall in global income this year, while world trade could contract by between 13 and 32 per cent.

Many states in Nigeria have taken drastic measures including total lockdowns and border closures in an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19. Most of the country’s workforce, precisely 80 per cent, fall under the informal sector and are daily earners. For Nigeria’s urban and extreme poor, social distancing is an arduous and impossible task to achieve. However, the presidency and state governments have kickstarted several rescue palliatives targeted at vulnerable citizens and businesses, whilst providing health workers at the frontline of the pandemic with the support they need.

For almost three weeks now, Nigeria’s tertiary institutions have failed to move their classes online as directed by the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu. We know that members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, who are supposed to upload their lecture notes online, are still on strike, but polytechnic and colleges of education lecturers are working. Yet, there are no online activities in these institutions. Could it be that the education minister has equally moved on, since it appears he is also no longer talking about the matter again?

Hardly a day passed without the late Chief of Staff to the President, Mallam Abba Kyari and I exchanging calls or WhatsApp messages. I never failed to forward negative comments I received about him and he took them as graciously as he took my criticisms of the government he served. But three weeks ago, his response to my post was uncharacteristic. At 5.40pm on 28th March, I had forwarded a message circulating on social media: “With donations streaming in from international organisations, private individuals and corporate bodies to help government fight Covid-19 in Nigeria, you can expect figures of the ‘infected’ to begin to rise exponentially, as every state seeks a bite into the coronavirus cake. Mark my word!”

I do not gloat when someone dies, even if they were the most reprehensible in my world during their lifetime. I remember clearly the stunned face of the Nigerian compatriotic who broke the news of Sani Abacha’s death to me in Toronto, Canada, in 1998 when they saw I did not break out in jubilation. I felt incredibly relieved for Nigeria, but I was not gloating for Sani Abacha's death. Abacha, like the recently-deceased Chief of Staff to the President Muhammadu Buhari, left behind loved ones, who no matter how strongly we may have felt against the deceased in their lifetime, did not share those negative sentiments and may have seen Abacha, like the family and loved ones of Kyari, as a paragon of virtue, no matter how misguided they may have been.

As conversations around COVID-19 move from death to data, ventilator to survivor, spread to flattening the curve, and lockdown to re-open, the relationship between China and the rest of the world is once again a subject of scrutiny.

I am at a loss as to how to begin this article. If I may ask, what can someone reasonably say to me to assuage the humiliation I feel by the bull’s-eye victory the Chadian forces scored against Boko Haram recently and the failure of our military to defeat these terrorists in the last 11 years? How can the military reasonably justify their failure to defend the fatherland? There is no doubt that Nigeria is fighting a half-hearted war against a barbaric brood of vermin – a very determined enemy whose intransigence has lasted this long because of a combination of perplexing geopolitical/religious considerations and corruption within the military/political establishment.

Caveat: There is difference between upholding and protecting Nigeria’s defence and security institutions of which advocacy for sustained reforms must be upheld, and holding individual personnel accountable for their alleged crimes. Therefore, the focus of this article is to condemn the barbaric and atrocious acts of the few bad eggs and criminals in uniform–whose penchant to kill fellow Nigerians at the slightest provocations–has left an ugly stain on their agencies and undermined the commendable efforts of their professional colleagues. Is it not tragic to note that from the latest figures, Nigerians who were felled by the bullets of the law enforcement officials as a result of the lockdown order, are more than those that have so far died from the Coronavirus pandemic.

If you are a state governor in Nigeria and you are not already working round the clock, night and day, you are playing with fire.

Aso Villa, Nigeria’s seat of presidential power is bereaved. On Friday, April 17, 2020, it recorded its first major casualty of the Corona Virus disease, in the person of the President’s Chief of Staff, Malam Abba Kyari. With Kyari’s death, Corona Virus has claimed its third high profile victim in Nigeria. Before Kyari was the former Managing Director of the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC), Suleiman Achimugu and Ambassador Kabiru Rabiu, the first index case in Kano.

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to preserve these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.

In 1999, the nation returned back to democratic rule after a 16-year hiatus, no thanks to the gory era of military rule. The then President, Olusegun Obasanjo, who was akin to a clone of the revered Nelson Mandela as both men went from the penitentiary to the highest office in the land, decided to model his government after what is obtainable in the United States of America. The White House since the first Presidency dating back to 1789 under the leadership of the war hero, George Washington, created the office of the Chief of Staff. This precedent has been followed in US till date.

 The Coronavirus pandemic appears to be on the ascendancy in Nigeria due to the inconsistency and double standards of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and lack of coordination on the part of the Federal Government in addressing the health crisis.

“In the world today, however, it is dangerous to seem to be too power hungry, to be overt with your power moves.” “Do not build fortresses to protect yourself–isolation (COVID-19 style) is dangerous”, Robert Green, ‘The 48 Laws of Power’.

I woke up this morning from my shelter-in-place in the US with two bad news.  I heard the bad news that the Chief of Staff to President Buhari, Alhaji Abba Kyari is dead. The terse announcement I read from the Presidency said he died from Corona 19 virus. This is the enemy we the two billion people on earth are hunkering down from and trembling, lest its rapacious hands pierce through concrete and metal walls to grab at our throats.

On January 18, 2020, when I first read of the new coronavirus on the BBC website, my heart missed a beat because of what China means to the world. The headline was: “New virus in China ‘will have infected hundreds’.” And these were the opening paragraphs: “The number of people already infected by the mystery virus emerging in China is far greater than official figures suggest, scientists have told the BBC. There have been more than 60 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, but UK experts estimate a figure nearer 1,700. Two people are known to have died from the respiratory illness, which appeared in Wuhan city in December.” I feared for Nigeria in particular.

The virtues of silence practically cease to apply the moment one starts to hold a public office. There is always a need to set the facts straight,keep the people abreast of developments and reassure them their trust is in safe hands.

When under the auspices of the federal Govt of Nigeria, the CBN Governor,  Godwin Emefiele influenced the banning of 45 items/products that he reckoned could be produced locally in Nigeria from being imported and pilling needless pressure on the foreign exchange reserve , he became the butt of the jokes of prominent Western media  organizations, particularly the  Economist magazine of London, Time magazine of New York and Wall Street Journal, WSJ which stopped short of labeling Nigeria’s CBN Governor, a demagogue for banning items , as ridiculous in their estimation, as tooth pick from receiving foreign exchange allocation from the CBN for its importation.

“The pride of man will be humbled And the loftiness of men will be abased; And the Lord alone will be exalted in that day…” – Isaiah 2: 17-18 “Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished…” – Proverbs 16: 5

It’s amazing how some people are responding to the challenges posed by this COVID-19 pandemic. A university in Japan just developed some robots to represent its graduating students at their convocation ceremony. This was done to beat the social distancing measures brought about by the pandemic. A team of robots with Ipads for faces would be standing in for students of the Business Breakthrough University in the capital city of Tokyo. The students would be controlling the robots’ motions remotely from home using computers as they collect their certificates on their behalf at the graduation ceremony.

The United States President, Donald Trump’s decision to cut WHO to size was nothing but international politics at its best. It is also a reflection of Trump’s campaign promises and testament to the policy cornerstone of his presidency—anti-multilateralism.

The covid-19 pandemic has dealt a severe injury to Africa’s development prospects and worsened the conditions of its poor and vulnerable. Although there are calls for voluntary international aid to support the continent during this difficult time, this is far from the best solution.

The news media made headlines recently when Boss Mustapha, secretary to the government of the federation (SGF) and head of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, admitted – honestly, I dare say — that he didn’t know our healthcare system was completely broken and on life support; even the ventilators supplying the much needed oxygen were borrowed. It was like breaking news for the Big Boss who became aware of our unacceptable healthcare system on account of his current national assignment on COVID-19. Mustapha, according to news reports, made this revelation when he met with the leadership of the National Assembly on the global pandemic. “Nigeria needs to improve its healthcare system as developed countries were struggling to contain the global pandemic,” Mustapha counseled during the meeting.

Following a meeting in Beijing last Thursday, the ‘Group of African Ambassadors’ wrote a joint letter to Chinese authorities to express their displeasure with the growing “discrimination and stigmatization” of people from the continent. Without a single report that African nationals have violated Chinese government anti-pandemic regulations, the ambassadors said, “we have received disquieting reports of inhuman treatments meted out to Africans particularly in Guangdong Province.”

The coronavirus has changed the modern world with a velocity unforetold. To protect their populations, nations have taken unprecedented steps in closing down cities, halting socio-economic activities and quarantining vast numbers of people.

Penultimate Wednesday I received two calls from the UK with both callers asking the same question: Is MTN leaving Nigeria? Why are they dumping 15 percent of their shares in the market at this time?

These are desperate times the world over. Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has taken a number of steps in the right direction in our battle to contain the pandemic. Some of our state governors are also proving their mettle by their actions, while some others are trivialising this crisis and putting their people at risk with pedestrian rhetoric and stupid actions. Just like was recorded in Bible times during Job’s crisis, we can also see that “Great men are not always wise.” We have come to discover in stark relief the number of misfits we have leading us. It is also in this time of war that generals are earning their stripes, and by God’s grace the day would soon come when we would celebrate the heroes of this battle and document their roles in serving our common good.

As many people are now aware, the outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in China has rapidly permeated and profoundly changed the world. While this crisis is first and foremost a public health issue, which has claimed the lives of over 123,600 people worldwide, and counting, the economic damages are unprecedented on several fronts.

Whenever man is confronted with a terrifying aspect of the world in which he lives, his natural instinct is to seek to understand the new phenomenon and bend it to his will. Pre-historic man opted for ritual as a means of mollifying and dominating his environment, but man soon moved from the age of rituals to the age of science, the advancement of which conferred on mankind enormous powers of manipulation and exploration, and the illusion of omnipotence. The paradox, however, is that the more man conquers his space, the more he is confronted with the realization that there is still a lot about the world that he is yet to know. Science has helped man, but it has also failed him, and each time man is confronted with yet another unknowable, he falls back on his primordial code of religious ritual.

Life is full of ironies, many unintended and unanticipated consequences – good and bad consequences alike. When on the 5th of December, 2019 the Federal High Court sitting in Lagos convicted Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK) for fraud, and sentenced him to 12 years in prison, many, including me, saw what happened just as another instance of the falling of the mighty, with the emphasis on the falling. But there has been some unintended consequence to it all.