The National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, released the full-year Gross Domestic Product, GDP, figures for 2017 showing that the economy grew at O.82 per cent. Despite the attempt by the NBS to point out the positive aspects of this result, it is the aggregate that should worry us.

As reported, the economy, in the fourth quarter, Q4, of last year grew at 1.92 per cent compared to 1.4 in the third quarter, Q3, of the same year and -1.73 in Q4 of 2016. There is certainly some progress, but 0.82 for 2017 is far from the full-year result in 2014 and even 2015. In reality, any growth less than one per cent is not regarded as growth at all.

The NBS would have done a better job of the reporting if the actual result was compared to the budget. After all, the year’s activities were supposed to achieve certain goals called deliverables. The GDP growth projected for 2017 in the budget was over three per cent. The actual result was 0.82 per cent which was closer to the projections by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, IMF. Obviously, the global institutions were more realistic with their estimates than Nigerian officials who were more politically-minded.

The major reason for the failure was our overly optimistic forecast of daily crude oil exports – which we placed at 2.2 million barrels per day, bpd. By May last year, it was clear to all but the Ministry of Petroleum that 2.2bpd was a pipe dream. It had been for the four previous years. The track record did not deter the government from adopting 2.2bpd as basis for budgeting in 2017. Unwittingly, government officials built failure into that budget.

With the GDP growth of -1.58 per cent in 2016 and a mere 0.82 per cent in 2017, the NBS perhaps deliberately omitted to mention that with the population growth of close to three per cent, Nigerians are now much poorer than they were in 2015. With the 2018 budget now held hostage to Executive/Legislative muscle-flexing, it is a safe bet that 2018 will again result in under three per cent GDP growth. The social consequences of deepening poverty are there for all to see.

The marginal upbeat result for 2017 should be regarded not as a triumph. The government’s emphasis on GDP figures in the past few quarters conveniently leads to the conclusion that the economy has been navigated out of recession. But when we consider how it pales in significance side by side with our population growth, it is obvious that ordinary citizens are still wallowing in the hardship that the recession imposed on them.

This is the challenge our economic managers must face and overcome.

Vanguard

In this piece, octogenarian and All Progressives Congress (APC) stalwart in Lagos State Pa Remi Williams examines the implication of carpet crossing for the polity.

Carpet crossing as a phenomenon has eaten deep into Nigeria’s political system. That is why it deserves special attention to root it out. But it is not new in Nigeria. The only dimension is that it is now done with ulterior motive and impunity.

For example, one can loot the government’s treasury and take refuge by crossing to the party in power.  Painfully, there is no evidence of party discipline. The slogan: ‘No permanent friend, no permanent enemy. Only permanent interest’ has become the order of the day.

Let me go back memory lane. In the First Republic, Nigeria adopted the Westminster system of government, also known as bicameralism. In the Second Republic, it fell in love with the American presidential system of government, which has remained with us since. But now we are veering towards a two-party system.

Yet, the idea of a two-party system is not so. It is that the opposition keeps the government in power on its toes by giving out constructive criticisms. That is their responsibility. So much so that they too could one day take over the government, if the one in power does not live up to the expectation of the people.

In pre-Independence Nigeria under Regional governments, the election was free and fair by all standards. It was this system of government that massive carpet crossing was experienced, especially in the Western Region. Two-party system also dominated then. The Action Group (AG) and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) were in alliance. The ruling party was the NPC, the AG and some parties voted along ethnic lines. 

The NPC led by Northerner got its votes mainly from the North, AG from the West and NCNC from the East, after a failed attempt by the party leader Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe to rally support from the West failed as the AG leaders saw through their plan to remove the seat of power from under them.

On the basis of this, Dr Azikiwe led the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region as premier; Chief Obafemi Awolowo became premier of the Western Region; while the Sarduana of Sokoto, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, became the Northern Region premier. This was the beginning of carpet crossing in Nigeria. However, today’s carpet crossing is different from what happened in the 50s. Today’s own is aimed at evading prosecution. It appears those in the opposing camp enjoy freedom from persecution hence the carpet crossing.

The Nation

The ruling by Justice Yusuf Halilu of the FCT High Court in Jabi, Abuja last Tuesday granting bail to Maryam Sanda, who the police accuse of killing her husband Bilyamin Bello last November, caused bewilderment, consternation and outrage all across this country.  Justice Halilu granted the bail the fifth time the defence counsel asked for it. The trial judge had rejected four previous occasions bail applications.

But following a fifth application by her lawyer Joseph Daudu, SAN he ruled that the court was satisfied with the health reasons canvassed. She was said to be over three months pregnant and also suffering from several health challenges, including stage three asymptomatic and drug non-responsive severe hypertension.

A copy of the medical report attached to the bail application, signed by one Dr Ogorochi N.M. for the Consultant in Charge of the National Hospital, stated that “on observation during some of the visits to her in custody together with her family members, the patient complained of frequent headache, palpitation, increased confusion, blurred vision and presented early edema on the legs and progressive chest pain.”

He then recommended her “immediate release for detailed medical investigations of the already manifested symptoms and comprehensive medical treatment coupled with adequate home rest to avoid acute coronary, cerebral or renal ischemia which may result.”

Maryam Sanda is standing trial for one of the most gruesome murders witnessed in this country. Bilyamin was killed in cold blood on November 19, last year. Police later charged his wife to court as the suspected murderer. Bilyamin was the nephew of former PDP chairman Dr. Bello Haliru Mohammed while Maryam is the daughter of a former executive director of Aso Savings and Loans Limited, which heightened public interest in the case.

Maryam was alleged to have stabbed Bilyamin to death over a text message supposedly sent to him by a girlfriend. She was also reported to have taken him to the hospital where she allegedly confessed to the crime.  Still, early efforts to cover up the crime, Maryam’s mother’s wealth and influence and the hiring of a high-profile lawyer made many Nigerians sceptical about the case. 

There was a ray of hope that justice will be served when the suspect was arraigned and detained in Suleja Prison and denied bail on four occasions. It was therefore shocking and disappointing that the bail was granted at the fifth attempt. Ordinarily murder is not a bailable offence, which was why the judge refused to grant it on four occasions.  So, what changed?  The excuse of Maryam’s alleged poor health is not tenable because in Nigeria, every big person who is detained immediately claims that he or she is in poor health.

The medical report should be queried and a doctor appointed by the court should examine the suspect.  Even if Maryam is suffering from all the illnesses diagnosed by her doctor, she should remain in custody and attend prison medical facilities.

There are many pregnant women and many women with infant children in prisons all across Nigeria. Why should the rich be given preferential treatment, especially when the offence she allegedly committed is so heinous?  

Bail is at the discretion of a judge and in this case, the judge exercised his discretion scandalously. It is not for nothing that murder is not a bailable offence because it could encourage the victim’s family to take the law into their own hands.

We urge the FCT Chief Judge and National Judicial Council to quickly step in and rectify this outrage because it completely erodes public confidence in the nation’s judiciary.

Daily Trust

Last week, the Plateau State government declared Thursday, March 8,  a work-free day to enable residents of the state to welcome President Muhammadu Buhari, who was on a one-day working visit to the state. The measure was announced by the state Head of Service, Mr. Izam Azi,  after an emergency meeting of the State Executive Council. Azi said: “The holiday will afford civil servants and other citizens the opportunity to give the president a rousing welcome.” Curiously, however, the state Commissioner for Information and Communication, Mr. Yakubu Dati, announced that there would be restriction of movement during the visit, especially around areas where the president would inaugurate projects.

In the extant case, it is difficult to see any justifiable reason for paralysing economic activities in Plateau State just because of a few hours’ visit by the president. To all intents and purposes, last week’s holiday in Plateau State was unnecessary, frivolous and self-serving. If, for any reason, Governor Simon Lalong felt the need to stage a public demonstration of his love for the president, he should not have dragged the people of the state into his game. His action smacked of executive frivolity and should not be tolerated in a sane society.

It is, therefore, incumbent on stakeholders in the political process, particularly the media, the academia, civil society groups and religious institutions, to  keep sensitising the people in order to ensure that politicians do not continue to take them for granted. Last week’s public holiday in Plateau State did the people of the state no good and such holidays must cease forthwith.

Tribune

THE firing of U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, will not lead to an improvement in strained ties with Germany, Deputy Foreign Minister, Michael Roth, said on Tuesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he had replaced Tillerson with Central Intelligence Agency Director, Mike Pompeo, ousting the embattled top diplomat after several public rifts.

In an impromptu news conference on the White House lawn, Trump told reporters there was a “chemistry” problem between him and Tillerson.

“It was a different mindset. It was a different thinking,” Trump said, adding: ‘’I think Rex will be much happier now.”

A senior White House official said Trump wanted to orchestrate a change to his national security team ahead of planned high-stakes talks with North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, Tillerson, a Texan and the chief executive of energy company ExxonMobil for a decade before joining the administration, has long been dogged by reports that his time in office will be cut short.

Trump frequently cast Rex as weak and clueless.

Their long-simmering tensions erupted into the public in October, after Tillerson suggested the U.S. could engage in talks with North Korea.

Days later NBC News reported that Tillerson had called the president a “moron” after a July meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials.

Tillerson never denied using the description but said he would not be part of an effort to divide the administration.

Trump then challenged his top diplomat “to compare IQ tests” in an interview with Forbes magazine.

The 65-year-old Tillerson was at odds with a number of Trump’s policies.

For example, he favoured the U.S. remaining in the Paris climate accord and has been less harsh towards Iran on questions relating to a deal to keep it from attaining nuclear weapons.

Tillerson arrived back from a four-nation tour of Africa early Tuesday.

The trip was cut short by a day, a schedule change Tillerson had said was due to the developments with North Korea.

Trump added that CIA Deputy Director, Gina Haspel is in line to become the next CIA director, which would make her the first woman to hold that job.

Pompeo, 54 is an avowed opponent of the Iran nuclear deal and Tea Party conservative, who used to represent Kansas in the U.S. Congress.

Pompeo was highly critical of Iran’s nuclear deal with six world powers, which was agreed to in 2015 and meant to constrain Tehran’s ability to make nuclear weapons for at least 15 years.

Trump has pledged to pull the U.S. out of the deal if substantial changes are not soon made.

Reuters

Since he led the protest over the passage of the change of elections sequence, Senator Abdullahi Adamu (APC, Nasarawa West) has been having a running battle with the Senate leadership. First, he was removed as the Chairman of the Northern Senators Forum (NSF) over allegation of financial misconduct. He was shortly after accused by Senator Obinna Ogba (PDP, Ebonyi) of plotting the removal of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki. In this interview, he speaks on the issues and many more. Excerpts:

You have been in the spotlight recently. First you were removed as the Chairman of the Northern Senators Forum (NSF) and now one of your colleagues has accused you of plotting Saraki’s removal. Why do you think they are after you?

To be honest with you, why they are after me should be answered by those you perceived are after me. As far I’m concerned, I respect everybody in the senate. As far I’m concerned, I have never dreamt wanting the position of the senate president or any other principal officer of the senate. If I had wanted the senate presidency, I was free to contest for it, but I wasn’t and that was why I didn’t.

Yes, I may not have supported Saraki’s emergence as the senate president because I wasn’t part of the circumstances that produced him; but in order to make for peace, I was talked to and we decided to let the sleeping dog lie. 

The leadership of the government, the presidency and the party didn’t fight when this thing happened under their watch, so I felt there was no point to fight to any ridiculous level. In this room that we are having this interview, people from outside the senate came wanting me to vie (for the Senate presidency) but I said no. In the end, people who wanted to make peace came and said we should give it a chance and we made it very possible to have peace and I have never changed my mind on that.

I have no problem with the senate president; I’m not looking for his seat but somehow he is a kind of guy who is operating by proxy, principle of proxy. You know he has errand boys who take it upon themselves to do the hatchet man’s. If there is anything that is going to happen and he feels it will be a bit hard to swallow, he will make sure he is not on the stage and he will have Ike Ekweremadu to do the dirty work for him.

The particular example you brought about NSF. This forum and the Southern Senators Forum (SSF) are informal fora. They are not in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and are not in the senate’s standing orders. NSF is an informal group. We meet on the basis that we have common interest as northerners, just as the southern senators meet. I became one with the exception of this Eighth Senate. I was not elected on the floor of the senate, nor do we do anything on the floor of the senate. We meet outside. I, as the chairman, will give notice of meeting and I don’t remember giving any notice for any meeting where the issue of my chairmanship was discussed; including my removal. But I felt I needed not to waste my precious time to begin to cry that I was removed as the chairman of the forum. Yes, I felt alright when I was made the chairman. 

But if the senate president and his deputy have problems with me and they believe the best way to contain me is to arrange one of their boys to remove me as the chairman of the forum, no problem.

What about the issue of the N70m reportedly swallowed by a monkey?

In order to give a dog a bad name, they now went to say that they had N70m that I mismanaged or whatever. The NSF, to the best of my knowledge, has never had N70m, at least not during my tenure that they purported it was mismanaged. We inherited something in the region of N62m/N63m that was declared by the out gone secretary of the forum who happens to be the present Senate Leader, Ahmad Lawan. I didn’t touch one kobo until when we were going to Katsina for the NSF retreat. When we were going, we got the same guys to sign for the transport fares.

Every senator that attended was paid N250, 000 as allowance for his two days and everyone also got N150, 000 for return ticket. They got these and they signed. The remaining money was returned to Abuja and was paid back into the account.

You know, when you talk of money, everybody’s attention will be attracted. They did this to get attention, but this is just garbage, and for the allegation, it is up to them to prove. 

All these started when you protested the change in elections sequence. Is the battle over?

I believe as a senator, it is not over because they will transmit it to the president for assent, he can sign it and he may decide not to assent to it. Remember, on the floor of the senate, they are saying they will override him (the president) as if they are in a motor park. They said so freely as if they had a grudge against the president. 

As a senator, I started talking to people who shared opinion with me on the passage of the bill. We are talking on it and yes, I have been holding meetings on it. I have a right of association, a fundamental right in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the fact that my position as a senator has not been taken away from me. There is no law that says that if a decision is taken on the floor of the senate, right or wrong, a senator has no right to talk to anybody outside the chamber on the matter; there is no such law. 

So, I have decided to be having meetings here, I have been having the meetings and I will continue to have the meetings. The worst anybody can do is to suspend me, but they don’t have any authority over my membership of the senate.

What do you want to achieve with these meetings?

I’m waiting for that opportunity when this matter will require our attention again. If it comes in any form, we will assert our interest in any form. As I said, it is not over.

Before the passage of the amendment to the electoral act, how was your relationship with the senate president?

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have anything against him. I’m not God. God made him President of the Senate. Whatever the circumstances that he followed, as a Muslim I believe that it was God that made him. It wouldn’t have been possible if God did not will it. As a faithful, I took it to be so and till date that’s my attitude to him, and he knows it.

What I do not accept is that as he always says, and as most people say when it is convenient for them, “Use good reasons to do bad things.” 

People talk about strengthening institutions; I love the idea but I have a terrible allergy for people using public institutions to serve themselves instead of public good. And as long as I’m able, I will continue to protest this.

Today, they say I’m supporting Buhari; yes I do. Buhari is a person who is under oath as the president of this country and I’m under oath to support the president of my country as a senator. Yes, I can differ, but where I differ there are attitudes that I will adopt. I can’t reduce myself to some kind of garage boy, grandstanding in the senate.

One of your colleagues, Obinna Ogba, alleged that you want to destabilise the senate. Why sir?

I don’t have to go through the backdoor to do anything. I’m not after anybody’s seat and I’m not plotting to destabilise the senate. 

Evidence has been tendered against you. What is it all about?

That’s not for today. They said so and it is part of their exhibit. I wasn’t in the senate on that day, but this is like what we call secondary evidence; but by the time I see it myself, I can use it as primary evidence if I have need for it. At the moment, my eyes are on the ball. I’m not in tune with the way and manner the amendment was done. It didn’t keep with the letters of the constitution and the senate rules.

Senator Ali Ndume that was referred to the ethics committee last year was suspended. Are you not afraid that same fate may befall you now that you have been referred to the same panel? 

Afraid of what? I’m 72 years old. I did not buy it from the market and my father was a headmaster when I was born; so he knew how to keep records of the birth of his children. My birthday is not based on the reign of an emir or fire disaster or famine; the date I was born was recorded. If I’m suspended; that would not be the end of the world. I’m a professional, I can go back to engineering; I will feed. I can go back to the law profession. I’m a lawyer and I will feed. 

Also, I can engage myself in farming, I’m a farmer and I will feed myself and others. I didn’t come to the senate because I had nothing doing, no. I came because my people wanted me to represent them. When I ended my tenure as governor, I left the stage completely until when my constituents came calling.

Like I keep saying, I didn’t inherit a political empire, I worked through the ladder to get to where I’m, and till tomorrow, I can answer my father’s name. 

In case the president rejects the bill, can they get the required two third to override him?

I don’t want to ruin this thing on the pages of newspaper. I cross bridges when I reach them. Those who are doing all these, they know that’s not the last on the amendment. They haven’t seen the last yet. Just tell them that the last has not been heard on that amendment. By the grace of God, I have made a vow; I will not betray my party.

DailyTrust 

After a needless display of vulnerable arrogance President Muhammadu Buhari has allowed his presidential feet to step on the blood-stained soil of Benue State. At the time of writing this piece on Sunday the government and people of Benue were making arrangements to welcome the President.

Schoolchildren may line the streets to welcome the President. Traditional rulers will show up in their cultural finery. Top government officials will do their customary duty to pull off a hitch-free visit. But this is no ordinary visit. It is one that is supercharged with tension between the President on one hand and Governor Samuel Ortom and his people on the other.

Many Benue citizens have been killed in the past few months by some Fulani herdsmen. The Federal Government has been unable to stop their mad and murderous rampage. It has not also been able to bring the murderers to justice so far. Mr. Ortom has been afflicted by a creeping uneasiness and helplessness.

As the killings continue almost on a weekly basis, the governor is gripped by an obsessive sense of everything going wrong around him. He has urged his people to defend themselves with whatever means possible. That statement is the most damning commentary on the failure of the Federal Government to protect the life and property of its citizens wherever they may be.

As 73 persons were buried in a mass grave a few weeks ago in Benue, the public had urged the President to visit the state and convey his condolences. He did not. The public pressure has now yielded some fruits as he has now accepted to do so.

He also intends to visit other states where there have been killings. Besides, he has offered an explanation as to why he does not rush to scenes of disaster. He says: “People expect me to rush out to the fields to go and make noise. But I have my ways of gathering intelligence. I get to know what is happening without necessarily going to those areas.”

That is not the point. No President goes to a place of horror to gather information. Such visits are symbolic, they are meant for the leader to show his sympathy and empathy, to tell the people that he cares, that he feels what they feel, that he has come to comfort the wounded and the bereaved, that he would bind their wounds and he would bring them the balm of justice.

It is one sure way of connecting with the people, of oiling the leader-led relationship wheel. Strangely, almost all our Presidents since 1999 had behaved the same way as Buhari is doing. This is an indication that we want to run democracy in our own image, not the way those we borrowed it from do it.

During President Olusegun Obasanjo’s tenure (1999 to 2007) many people were killed in Zaki Biam by his security forces. A whole town, Odi, was wiped out and scores of people murdered by his security men on the pretext that some hoodlums killed some security officers. The logic of wiping out a town from the face of the earth because of the rascality of a few hoodlums did not make much sense to most people. The rational thing would have been to fish out the perpetrators of the crime and bring them to justice. Having made those irresponsible killings in Odi and Zaki Biam because of the anger of the moment, the public expected the President to visit these places before his exit and make peace and restitution with the aggrieved communities. He did not.

And when the Chibok schoolgirls were abducted in April 2014, most Nigerians thought that President Goodluck Jonathan would show his grief by visiting Chibok immediately. He did not. So it can be said without fear of any contradiction that ignoring the people in grief by our leaders has become a national ritual. It also shows the inability by our leaders to understand that leaders are expected to demonstrate true statesmanship during periods of national grief as a means of connecting with their people.

American leaders have learnt to do this effortlessly. In the thick of the Iraq war number two, President George Bush the son took the ultimate risk of visiting Iraq. He made himself a steward, dishing out food to American soldiers. He who sent them to battle was making a symbolic gesture of being with the soldiers in the thick of battle.

For those warriors and the Americans back home, the President had shown that fighting in Iraq was a risk worth taking, that he was a man of valour. In the same manner, President Barack Obama had flown into Afghanistan when it was still risky to set foot on the soil that the Talibans had made more dangerous than dangerous. President Donald Trump who has a cynical style of governance has visited several trouble spots since he assumed office a few years ago.

It has become not just an American tradition but actually part of the democratic ethos to connect with the people. On those occasions they pump the flesh and they make stirring speeches.

One example will do. One hundred and ten young girls are abducted from their school by terrorists and taken away to an unknown destination. At the same period the President is attending a loud wedding ceremony in Kano with 22 other leaders of our nation. Juxtapose the two events and see whether such leaders are smelling like roses.

The marriage was between two children of the Governors of Kano and Oyo states. It is a happy event for both the children and their parents but in the midst of a national calamity such as the Dapchi disaster common sense dictated that it should have been toned down considerably. The loudness of it was a repulsive and insensitive display of the arrogance of office. I am almost certain that the children who wedded would have wished that their marriage had been consummated without being brought into the national conversation in an unfavourable light.

Children of governors are obviously privileged children but nothing should be done to indicate that the other children who were not born into privilege do not matter. But above all it is the insensitivity of the carnival that rankles.

Buhari is going to Benue with the niggling guilt of his government’s failure to do its duty to the people of Benue State. That guilt is in three parts (a) Failure to prevent the killings. (b) Failure to bring the perpetrators to justice. (c) Failure to visit them in their hour of grief. But he is doing so now. The people of Benue should find room in their hearts for forgiveness and Buhari must find the right string of soothing words to cool tempers. Buhari is likely to shift uneasily in his seat during the visit.

The period will pass very slowly for him like a procession but he must take it in his stride. If he deals with the issues honestly and fairly, the uneasiness will begin to wither away. One of his problems is that he has a penchant for making unforced errors by what he says. In Taraba State, he said, rather incredulously, that the fatalities there were higher than they were in Benue. The implication of that is that more Fulani herdsmen were killed in Taraba than the people that herdsmen killed elsewhere.

He was trying to establish a pecking order between a flea and a fly. That is presidential indiscretion, a boo-boo that should never be repeated.

Every life matters, whether it is the life of a Fulani herdsman or that of a Tiv farmer. For a President, what should matter most should be how these killings can be stopped, how the killers can be punished and how sanity can be brought back to our communities, especially since the President said he “belongs to everyone and to no one.”

The Presidency has said President Muhammadu Buhari would first hear from the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, on the allegation of disobeying a presidential order to relocate to Benue State, before taking any action on the matter.

Buhari’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, said this when he spoke during a radio programme, Political Platform, on RayPower FM, in Abuja, yesterday.

Buhari had, during a meeting with stakeholders in Makurdi, during his state visit to Benue, on Monday, expressed surprise that the IGP did not adhere to his instructions to relocate to the state, in the aftermath of the January 1, 2018 killings.

Yesterday, Adesina said it would not have been proper for Buhari to act on the matter immediately the allegation was made.

He said being a fair-minded man, the president will give Idris the opportunity to defend himself before taking the next step.

“The president should act immediately and not hear from the other side? That will not be proper. A father does not act like that.

“Even in the home, if there is an allegation from somebody, you listen to the other side before you will do whatever you will do.

“The IG, as at yesterday (Monday), was out of the country. That allegation came from Benue people. Knowing the president, as a fair-minded man, he is going to listen to the IG; he is going to ask him to defend himself and then, the next step.”

On why it should be the people who will draw the president’s attention to the IG’s disobedience of the order, when he was supposed to know whether his appointees were carrying out his orders or not, Adesina replied that Buhari, although he is president, “is not omniscient.”

The presidential spokesman added: “No human being is omniscient, it is only God that is omniscient; He knows all things.

“The president said last week that he has his channels of getting information apart from security reports he receives as president but it does not mean that he gets every information under the sun.

“Even in the best countries in the world, the super powers, there are still security breaches.”

Adesina disagreed that the IG’s disobedience has further exposed the president as not being in control of his government.

He contended that the fact remains that Buhari is in full charge of government and is running it efficiently.

 “Those who said that have a right to their opinion. This is a democracy.

He said contrary to opinions, Buhari’s ongoing trips to troubled states are not belated and reiterated that the president decided that the time was ripe for visit to the states, after he had received and studied reports on the various clashes. He added that the reports came first so that Buhari could have a balanced and proper perspective of what actually happened, before embarking on the trips.

Adesina also said the trips were meant to be sympathy and condolence visits, based on proper information.

The presidential spokesman also disagreed with opinions that Buhari should have visited the  bereaved families in Benue.

He insisted that those Buhari met with were stakeholders from across the divide, including Tiv, Idoma, Fulani, and others.

Sun

First, let’s deal with the praise, the plaudits, before ending this piece with the questions, the posers. Before I watched and heard him on television conduct an extraordinary “town meeting” with the business community in Lagos this last Monday, I hadn’t known much about Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State. As a matter of fact, the very little that I knew about him was not exactly flattering, to say the least: the razor-thin margin of only 150,000 votes – out of over 2 million votes cast – in his electoral victory over his PDP opponent in the gubernatorial race of 2015; and in 2016, the ugly spats between Ambode’s wife, the First Lady of Lagos State, and a state-employed chaplain of a church that had led to the rather highhanded sacking of that man of the cloth.

Moreover, when the Governor had come to Harvard last year to give a talk, I had been absent from my “duty post” at the time and thus missed the talk. All of which serves as the background to the pleasant surprise of the following things that I now report about Ambode’s televised meeting with the leaders of the business community this past week.

It is a well-known secret that most of the governors and high officeholders in Nigeria do not write the speeches they deliver in public. In addition, in general, once a speech is delivered, most of our rulers and politicians do not, indeed cannot, effectively field questions arising from speeches they deliver.

This is one aspect of the foul underbelly of democratic governance in our country, this fact that our rulers are in general incapable of conducting meaningful public dialogue with the citizenry, especially in the English language. As this is a huge subject, we cannot deal with it in this piece. Coming back to Ambode, I do not know if his speech on Monday was written by speechwriters; what I do know is that from his passionate and eloquent delivery, one can conjecture that he must have had a hand in writing the speech – if in fact he did not himself write it in its entirety.

The speech was masterful in its combination of technocratic prowess with social vision. Within five minutes into the speech, I recognized that I was watching and hearing something extraordinary and I immediately started taking mental notes. This essay is written entirely from those notes.

As the questions were posed, Ambode took notes, copiously.There were two sets of questions. The first set of questions were over a dozen in number; the second set had slightly fewer questions.

In any case, as questioner after questioner after questioner had his or her say, Ambode did not stop taking notes. After the number reached 12in the first set of questions and the questions did not stop but continued, the teacher in me became attentive and I asked of no one in particular, “why doesn’t the official directing the programme limit the questions to one or two at a time and how is the governor going to be able to respond meaningfully to all these questions”?

Needlessly and wordlessly, I answered my own question: “of course, he is not going to answer all the questions – he is a politician”! But Ambode did answer every question – and painstakingly so!

Please bear in mind, dear reader, that although all the questioners were from the business community as a very influential social group, the assembled audience of the governor’s performance at the “town meeting” came from an impressive diversity of interests and loyalties.

Permit me to identify the ones that I remember. Representatives of the big transnational corporations were there, but they were completely silent; they could be recognized or identified only by their white skins and by their silent but hegemonic embodiment of the vast economic and ideological muscle that runs planet earth in the name and interests of benign capitalism.

The Nigerian-owned big companies were there also in the persons of their MD’s or CEO’s; they addressed the Governor and were in turn addressed by Ambode with rather exaggerated politeness or even deference. Media and communications moguls were also present; and they posed questions pertaining to their own interests.

The Nigerian-American Chamber of Commerce was also present, represented by my old friend and hallmate at Kuti Hall UI, Bintan Famutimu, who put in a spirited plug for closer ties and links between the Lagos State government and major cabinet members and representatives of the American government.

And then, there were the women who spoke on behalf of SME’s, the small-scale enterprises. Please note, dear reader, that I say women. A there were only two of them, this made their under-representation at the forum rather coincident with the gender inequality that is so prevalent, so constitutive of economic and social power in our country and our continent.

Significantly, both women spoke about industrial activities linked with the recycling of waste products and the training and retraining of our unemployed and putatively “unemployable” youths. In other words, of all the business people who posed questions to the governor, these women were the most upfront, indeed the most insistent on the social good that their industrial and business activities and products entail.

For this reason, I admit that I watched the governor’s response to them with much greater attention than I did with his answers to the others.I can report that the governor did not condescend to them and that his response to these two women, these two representatives of SME’s, was of the same passion and eloquence with which he engaged all his interlocutors at the forum.

An astonishing feat then, that Ambode responded fully and robustly to all these interlocutors equally. Having been a teacher and a speaker at public forums for large segments of my adult life, I know what this implies: only she or he who is filled with passion, focus and dedication can respond to more than a dozen interlocutors with diverse interests, constituencies and loyalties as if every issue matters and everybody counts.

But every experienced teacher, every gifted public speaker knows that although all pupils and all issues and their representatives matter and count, they do so differentially. I saw this knowledge, this intuition play out astutely in Ambode’s responses to a good number of his interlocutors.

For instance, to the CEO of a company who posed a question about her and her company’s “tax fatigue”, Ambode was respectful while slyly justifying the crucial importance of taxes and even more taxes for a state like Lagos.

To big entrepreneurs who wondered about the logic behind the bloated number and scope of workers on the public payroll in the state, Ambode was polite, even deferential in his endorsement of the logic of rationalization on which big companies are run; however, he insisted that governments cannot, indeeds hould not, be run exclusively or even primarily on the same logic; human and social interests, the governor argued, should override logics of rationalization and profit maximization that drive the activities of big corporations.

I have stressed the fact that the interests, perspectives and constituencies represented by the governor’s interlocutors were quite diverse.

I must now observe that it seemed to me as I took in the whole performance that Ambode felt that as diverse as these interests and forces were they not conflicting and whatever tensions and conflicts might exist between and among them could be reconciled to the advancement of the progress and development of Lagos state. The old Marxist term for this idea is “non-antagonistic contradictions” as opposed to and in contrast with antagonistic contradictions.

Ambode did not use these terms, but I was deeply moved by two particular instances when he expressed a passionate advocacy for contradictions especially characteristic of the city of Lagos in the apparent belief that they are non-antagonistic contradictions. Permit me to briefly relate these two cases.

People think that one of the worst present and future nightmares of life in Lagos pertains to the number of cars plying the roads, relative to how many cars the roads, the streets, can take.

Not so, argued Ambode passionately; the worst problem of street life, the governor argued, is the number of people on the streets with absolutely no provision for them to be on the streets in safety and comfort. No pavements, no sidewalks, no margins at the edges of the asphalt for people to walk on in safety, relaxation and even leisure.

You hear talk about cars and congestion all the time, Ambode declared, but who speaks for people without cars, people that happen to be the overwhelming majority of Lagosians? As a columnist who has in the past both humorously and seriously argued for a “Pedestrians’ Bill of Rights” in our cities, I was particularly moved by Ambode’s eloquent and impassioned restatement of this issue.

Even more moved was I by the governor’s playfully ironic joke that serves as the title of this piece: “We’ll keep them off the streets so that we can sleep at Banana Island!” The “we” here apparently refers to Ambode and his audience, his interlocutors at the “town meeting”, the crème de la crème of Lagosian society, the economic, social and political elites of the city and the state of Lagos.

What of the “them” that are to be kept off the streets? These are the talakawa, the denizens of the “Other Lagos” none of whom was present, indeed could be present at that encounter between the Governor and the business elites. Of the 25 million that constitutes the population of the city and the state, “they”happen to be the vast human and demographic majority whose internal majority is a whopping 65% that are under the age of 35.

If we can find gainful employment for “them”, if we can keep “them” busy and engaged in productive activities that keep “them” off the streets, Ambode was in effect saying, then we, the elites, can sleep at night without being haunted by the specter of their invasion of our homes, our rest, our peace, our security, our conscience. I do not think I have heard or read of a more powerful expression of the social contract between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless from any of our rulers and politicians in a long, long time, in fact since the days of Obafemi Awolowo and thePeople’s Redemption Party.

In conclusion, I now go, briefly and succinctly, to my questions for Governor Ambode and indeed forall of us. I have only two posers.

The first one pertains to the forces and interests involved in the realization of the social contract. Basically, I ask: who is present and who is absent, who is included and who excluded in the adjudication of struggles over the social contract? At the “town meeting” of the Governor with the business elites, the poor, the talakawa,together with their representatives, were absent. Would it have made a difference if they had been present and had also been vocal about their interests? Please note that as I stated at the start of this essay, Ambode’s electoral victory was about 150,000 votes out of over 2 million votes cast. The two million was itself only a fraction of the population of the state, which is 25 million. Will Governor Ambode correct this massive disenfranchisement of the majority of the people of his state? Will he bring the “Other Lagos” directly to the table and not only raise their presence as a specter that to disturb the peace and the good conscience of the rich?

Second poser: In the 1990 and 1999 Constitutions, Second Chapter titled “FundamentalObjectives and Directives of State Policy” it is clearly stated that it is unfair, as all previous Nigerian Constitutions had assumed, thatthe goals of development and social justice cannot be pursued simultaneously and indivisibly, that “development” must take place first before economic redistribution can take place. Both Constitutions made it mandatory for the Nigerian state to pursue both goals together; however, this was made non-justiciable meaning that the Nigerian state and its functionaries cannot be legally forced to observe or actualize this provision, this clause in the Constitution.

From his speech last Monday, especially in the segment wherein he fielded all those questions, I conjecture that Ambode is on the side of this constitutional clause. Will he step forward now and say so? More to the point, will he state what forces, what allies, what coalitions he, his administration and his political party intend to mobilise to realize this objective?

Jeyifo is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at the Harvard University, U.S.A.

BEFORE THE LONDON PRISONERS ARRIVE

In a not-so-subtle vote of no confidence in the Nigerian prison system, the United Kingdom is planning the construction of a £700,000 jail in our country so as to deport some criminals and free up places in British jails. The 112-bed wing at the Maximum Security KiriKiri Prison in Lagos will be built as part of the compulsory prisoner transfer deal signed with Nigeria in 2014, according to Foreign Secretary, Mr. Boris Johnson. “As part of this agreement, eligible prisoners serving criminal sentences in Nigeria and the UK can be returned to complete their sentences in their respective countries,” he said.

The decision came in the wake of the amendment to the Transfer of Convicted Offenders (Enactment and Enforcement) Act Cap T16 2004. Signed into law in 2014 by President Goodluck Jonathan, the consent of convicted Nigerians serving various jail sentences in the UK is no longer required before they are repatriated home to continue to serve their respective jail terms. But, as we pointed out in the past, the law could be deployed to send away our nationals who may be legal residents in the United Kingdom where they may also have immediate family members. Besides, as we also observed before the bill was passed into law in 2014, there are serious implications for some of our nationals who could now be easily criminalised on grounds of immigration status and repatriated to the country without due process.

It is unfortunate that despite the high-level rhetoric on prison reforms by successive Nigerian governments, no concrete actions have been taken to massively decongest our prisons and ameliorate the inhuman condition under which many prisoners live and even work. For example, the Olusegun Obasanjo government set up a National Working Group on Prison Reform and Congestion to audit the state of the country’s prisons and make recommendations to the government. Successive justice ministers have equally been making recommendations to the government on how to reform our prisons. Unfortunately, nothing fruitful has come out of these seemingly lofty initiatives.

The main obstacle to the reforms is the gross over-population of the Nigerian prisons. According to many Amnesty International reports, about 70 per cent of the people in Nigerian prisons have never been convicted of any crime. What that suggests is that efforts to decongest our prisons or ameliorate the plight of inmates would come to naught without a complete overhaul of the country’s criminal justice system. Just last week, the Minister of Interior, Lt General Abdulrahman Dambazau (rtd) visited the Port Harcourt prison which was built for 804 prisoners but now currently accommodates 4204 inmates. The situation is similar, or perhaps even worse, in other prisons across the country.

The news that the UK authorities will bringing back convicted Nigerian prisoners abroad to come and complete their jail terms at home should be a wake-up call on the imperative of reforming our prison system. The prison that the British would build will be different from what currently obtains in Nigeria. We hope there will be sufficient lessons to learn from that.

Thisday