Don’t entertain any fears that I’m about to preach to you today; not at all! The pace of the beatings of the hearts of Nigerians has increased lately, inspired by fear owing to the alarming level of terror in the land. While unseen lurking dangers send shivers down the spine of mere men, the super mortals behind the iron walls of government houses run commentaries and perfect their art of lamentation each time purveyors of death strike.
I have no doubt hiding in any part of my mind that President Bola Tinubu has not been informed of the evils that have continued to befall the nation without ceasing. I’m very sure he is unaware that scores of pupils, including a two-year-old, and their teachers in the Ogbomoso area of Oyo State and dozens of young minds in kindergarten, primary and junior secondary schools in the Askira-Uba Local Government Area of the continually-troubled Borno State were carted away last week by the lunatics the nation has allowed to thrive for years. Do I need to remind the President that three people were cut down and over a dozen worshippers were abducted on Sunday in Kwara State for having the effrontery to go to church on Sunday?
If BAT had been informed early enough of the debilitating fear pervading the land, especially the relatively peaceful South-West, he would have prevailed on his party, the All Progressives Congress, to put on hold its ill-timed primaries while he urgently summons the executive, the National Assembly, the security agencies, the opposition parties, religious hierarchy and traditional leaders to an emergency summit to fashion out all-encompassing strategies to flush out deranged characters populating the landscape of the country but addressing themselves nicely as terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, killer herdsmen and other perennial criminals.
Since I’m very sure that our beloved Jagaban has not been told that insecurity is tearing the nation apart, kindly tell him, if you meet him, that the APC primaries (followed by other parties) that have held over the past few days, did not only assault the sensibilities of Nigerians, the organisers were insensitive, stripped of any ingredients of humanity and indirectly placing themselves under serious curses. The chokehold by which killers and mass abductors have held the nation by the jugular this year alone is enough to attract a nationwide state of emergency, confine frivolities like party primaries and fruitless talk shops to the backyard, while all agencies intentionally declare war on terrorists, jihadists, killers, kidnappers and their sponsors.
As a newsman, I hate relying on hearsay and reports lacking credible evidence to jump to any conclusion.
It is, however, troubling to hear from multiple credible sources that the recent bloodless coup (thank goodness) in the Progressive Governors’ Forum (governors of APC) that led to the attempted overthrow of the chairman and Imo State Governor, Hope Uzodimma, had to do with the mishandling of N800m the governors contributed towards the prosecution of the 2027 elections. I wonder if the President has been informed that these underhanded contributions were allegedly deducted from the federal allocations of his governors. Some of the governors were, however, not impressed when reportedly told that this fund had been judiciously expended, backed with very spurious explanations, when the electioneering hadn’t even started.
If Mr Tinubu had been briefed on this brazen illegality and barefaced stealing, he would have demanded quality explanations from the governors of his party on how they came about this ingenuous idea of mobilising funds illegally for the party. Whoever comes across the President, he should be told that it is highly possible that Nigerians may start to suspect him of knowing something or two about this stinking fund if he refuses to address and stop this illegality. Can someone please tell the President that the above-named amount, bigger than the annual budgets of no fewer than three states, is more than sufficient to buy 800 drones to police all the forests in Nigeria where terrorists, bandits and kidnappers are said to be hiding? But I’m sure, BAT has not been told.
Is it not strange that the Department of State Services, Directorate of Military Intelligence and other security agencies, which could track and apprehend anyone making posts that rubbish the reputation of another person, especially government officials, find it impossible to locate terrorists, who no longer hide their identities but have taken over social media, posting ransoms for kidnapping innocent Nigerians; their arms haul and streaming beheading defenceless citizens? Sadly, the President hasn’t been told the ordeal of a nation; he definitely does not know.
As a champion of local government autonomy, Tinubu can’t stomach the subjugation of the local governments by the state governors. This, I believe, was behind the Federal Government’s suit against the states to ensure unequivocal constitutional backing for the financial independence of the local government administration in the country. The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit once threatened to sanction any state tampering with LG funds. Our President appears not to have been told that the suit by the states to reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court on LG autonomy is awaiting ruling (by which court, you may ask?) while the judgment of the apex court on the financial autonomy of the councils has not been complied with.
Whoever comes across the President should tell him that the NFIU, which threatened to come down heavily on any state tampering with local government allocations, has not been able to apprehend any culprits despite the obvious warehousing of the LG funds by the states. It is important to tell the President, who is clearly oblivious of this evil, that the local governments are currently in ‘siddon look’ mode, completely in a coma, having been pummelled into submission by our powerful governors. May I inform our LG-loving President that I find it hard to question my council chairman why it had to take the state government 13 years to construct the only tarred road in my locality, less than 10 kilometres?
About 15 years ago, the then state government, under the leadership of one of our current distinguished senators, adopted a very novel idea of allocating N36m each to all local governments in the state, just to pay salaries. Then, the state awarded and executed non-existent contracts on behalf of the local governments, hiding under a dubious LG/state joint account, which has been toppled by the Supreme Court judgment.
What meaningful project do you expect from this tier of government, reputed to be closest to the grass roots? You can see that, truly, the nation is working intentionally to develop the grassroots and stop rural-urban migration. I bet this Jagaban has not been informed that in many states, the situation remains the same; nothing in particular has changed.
Has anyone forgotten the comical appeals (with due respect) of the President to our state’s excellencies to allow Nigerians to feel the impact of improved federal allocations to the states, ably facilitated by the withdrawal of fuel subsidy and the deliberate devaluation of the naira? Will someone whisper to Mr Tinubu that some of his governors have failed to listen to his appeals, which he made publicly twice? Will another person be kind enough to tell him that Bureau de Change operators feel the impact of the governors and heads of different MDAs more than the people they superintend? This obligation is necessary because the President has not been told of this ugly scenario.
Is it not necessary to send emissaries to BAT to be told that Nigeria may be making a return journey to Sodom if he allows the dirty political game (is this why people say politics is a dirty game?) between Dangote Refinery and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited (ably supported by saboteurs parading themselves as fuel marketers) to escalate beyond control? Since he is not aware, will someone do the nation a world of good by telling the President that his masterstroke of approving the sale of crude to the refinery in naira will pale to nothing it he allows Dangote and the NNPCL to push Nigerians back to the ready hands to foreigners who, through serial greedy leaders’ backing, robbed the nation blind, sadly using our God-given resources as a launch pad?
Effective 1990, during the regime of the self-styled military President, Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria’s four refineries in Port Harcourt (1 & 2), Warri and Kaduna packed up, much to the delight of the nation’s thieving leaders, their voodoo economists and cowboy investors. The sixth-largest producer of crude globally descended into the abyss of exporting crude and importing refined petrol at a premium.
Jagaban certainly knows that this unfortunate scenario matched the expectations of global financial institutions and their self-serving sponsors of perpetuating Africa’s underdevelopment – extract raw materials from Africa in their raw forms, process them and return the finished goods to the continent at very high costs while pretending to be doing the gullible countries’ favour in the name of bilateral relationship. It took the second political journey of Olusegun Obasanjo as a civilian President to reinstate the ban on export of cocoa beans and stop the export of cassava tubers.
I’m not sure if Mr Tinubu has been told that the Lagos-based refinery and the apex oil corporation have engaged in a subtle but dangerous battle over the corporation’s desire to acquire a bigger stake in the refinery (above its current eight per cent) and the oil regulator’s attempted fightback weapon. Since BAT is not in the know, someone should tell him that while Dangote has stubbornly shut the door against NNPCL’s higher-stakes plans, the oil giant is planning, once again, to throw open its doors to granting opportunistic marketers licences to import all manner of refined petrol from anywhere around the globe.
The President should be told that this dirty fight and its aftermath will fit perfectly into the Pull Him Down (PhD) plot of the International Monetary Fund against Nigeria to bail out dying refineries in Europe and send Nigeria’s economy back to Sodom, a poisonous route which should not be an option in our fight for survival. After all, the President should be reminded that he told us that we no longer owe the IMF directly or indirectly.
BAT should be told, in case he has been too busy lately, that the fund has never contributed positively to any economy it had planned to rescue since it began operations on March 1, 1947. In case he has not been told, it is important to tell Mr Tinubu that this inglorious path will open the floodgate to another fraud-laden fuel subsidy regime, which will be executed with more accurate precision by the same racketeers in the corporation and predatory importers and marketers.
The real tragedy then will be if the President is still not told that Nigerians desire that he should attend to the grey areas and many others in the same mould outlined in this unsolicited public service announcement.
