Connect with us

Strictly Personal

Naira and February feast of vultures, By Lasisi Olagunju

Published

on

The naira exchange affliction of 1984 rose up a second time in 2022 and spilled into 2023 because it has always been the choice of Nigeria to submit to vultures. Don’t fail to listen to Chief Bola Tinubu who philosophised in Osogbo last week that despite the rains beating the vulture since the very beginning, “it has not died; it has not fallen ill but has been taking offerings and eating sacrifices.” That is true. The hands of the Nigerian rains are too weak to stop the vulture – strong, tenacious, bald-headed bird of prey. Unlike James Hadley Chase’s, the Nigerian vulture is not patient; it is also not Kevin Carter’s vulture; it won’t wait on any starving girl to die before feasting on her corpse. From petrol stations to banking halls, birds of prey are on the prowl, scavenging for the remains of Nigeria.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In case you are like me and you often wonder what Karl Max meant with that expression, let me give some dictionary definitions of the key words there: A ‘tragedy’ “shows the downfall of a hero and does not have a happy ending.” A ‘farce’ “is a comedy in which everything is absolutely absurd.” As we struggle in banks for new naira notes just as we did 39 years ago, Karl Max, who issued that warning about history, tragedy and farce, would look at what we’ve done with our lives and shake his head. The 1984 outing of our hero in Abuja was tragic; the present is a farce. Yet, we’ve learnt nothing – we hail him as he raises tremulous hands at campaigns and announces winners before contests. A tragic farce is in rehearsal. And the hero does his predatory acting while the poor faint on petrol and naira queues.

Our children are lucky; they and their fathers got months of notice in 2022 from President Muhammadu Buhari on a transition from old naira notes to new ones. We and our fathers got two days’ notice in 1984 from General Muhammadu Buhari for a similar exercise. On Monday, 23 April, 1984, the Buhari government announced a sudden currency change with effect from Wednesday, 25 April, 1984. “The exchange will commence at commercial banks and at central bank branches at 8 a.m on Wednesday, the 25th of April, 1984 and will be completed at 6 p.m on Sunday, the 6th of May, 1984,” Buhari’s deputy, Tunde Idiagbon, told us in a special broadcast laden with tough talk on Monday, 23rd April. “Naira takes new colour” was how the Nigerian Tribune of April 24, 1984 reported what the government did. Nigerians were ordered to take their naira notes of N20, N10, N5 and N1 to the bank in exchange for new ones. All land borders were closed.

The then CBN governor, Abdulkadir Ahmed, directed that “individuals could exchange up to a maximum of N5,000 per person from any bank irrespective of whether or not the person is an account holder in that bank.” The CBN boss added that “exchange shall be by way of either payment into an account or direct across-the-counter exchange.” But then, in 1984, we took what we had to the bank and went back home empty-handed. Well, not entirely empty handed; receipts were issued to millions who had no bank accounts. But those pieces of paper could feed no one who held them, and so, there was an epidemic of hunger in the land. The currency exchange exercise lasted exactly 12 days – less than two weeks. There was no deadline extension. It was very hard depositing the old notes; it was harder retrieving the replacement from the banks. After the deadline, it became ‘now your suffering continues.’ People suffered; people died; some survived but got wrecked – and I will retell some of the harrowing stories here and now.

Banks remained riotous throughout last week and there were street protests, some with the fury of naked fire. The banks were rowdy also in April, May, June, 1984. Things were so bad that a bank in Ibadan put up a notice that customers who were dissatisfied with the guideline that they could not withdraw any amount above N50 should lodge their complaint with the Central Bank. A customer told a reporter that the bank’s notice was “rude and insulting since we did not bank with the Central Bank.” What we suffered that time was more than that insult. The rain was not a drizzle; it poured. ‘Banks ration money’ was how the Nigerian Tribune headlined its report on the experience on Friday, May 11, 1984: “Many Nigerians are starving because they do not have money to buy basic necessities of life, including foodstuffs. This is because commercial banks are not releasing enough money after the currency exchange exercise…At the Nigeria-Arab Bank in Ibadan, some customers whose cheques were accepted were told to come back today. The customers were informed by a bank official that they were expecting money from the Central Bank. One of the customers, Mr. Koya Salako, told the Nigerian Tribune that he had been going to the bank since Tuesday without receiving any amount. At the National Bank, Dugbe, no customer could withdraw more than N50. At the Union Bank, Dugbe, the people were allowed to withdraw between N100 and N200. At African Continental Bank. Dugbe, some customers went home disappointed yesterday as they could not withdraw even N100. None of the customers was attended to as there was no money to pay them. A man who claimed to have been at the bank since 7.30am yesterday said ‘I have deposited over N4,000 with them and I have got no money to maintain my family again. Please, tell them to give me N100 only for the time being.’”

That was 39 years ago.

Last week in Delta State, a bank customer slumped and died after standing for hours in a queue at a bank in Agbor. The police said “he was not trying to withdraw cash; he came to collect his ATM card.” That was tragic. People slumped on queues in 1984 but I can’t remember any of them dying. About two weeks after the currency exchange deadline, a woman slumped at the Cooperative Bank, Ibadan on Tuesday, May 15, 1984. She regained her consciousness later and told the people who revived her that she had not eaten for two days. “Sympathisers, however, called a food hawker and gave the woman her first meal in two days while bank officials paid her N50 instead of N150 she intended to withdraw from her account” (see Nigerian Tribune, May 16, 1984). Again, I said earlier that people died. It was real. ‘Man commits suicide’ was the lead headline of the Nigerian Tribune of June 5, 1984. The report: “A middle-aged man committed suicide in Ibadan last Wednesday following what sources described as ‘series of hopeless visits to his bank for cash.’ The partly decomposed body of Mr. K. O (I withhold the name), a 48-year old civil servant of the accounts department of the Oyo State Ministry of Information, Youths, Sports and Culture, was found dangling under the ceiling fan in one of his rooms three days after his death. A suicide note left on a stool in the room showed that he decided to end his life out of frustration. The deceased was said to have collapsed twice on the premises of a bank and was rushed home on each occasion without cash. Last Monday, May 28, two days before he committed suicide, somebody had given him N2 (two naira) after narrating his ordeal. An ulcer patient, the deceased was said to have complained about taking only pap, his regular meal since he couldn’t withdraw cash from his bank. His remains were laid to rest on Monday at the public cemetery, Sango, Ibadan. Contacted on telephone on Monday, the state Police Commissioner, Mr. Archibong Nkana, simply said: ‘I think there was something like that.’” The suicide note left behind by the deceased reads: “Do not forget that I have insisted that the receipt of the purchased stationery is in the steel cabinet. I’m sorry I have to end up this way but I think that is the only way open to me…” In 2015, we brought back the leader who staged that tragedy. He is leading his party’s campaigns for a renewal of the values he represents this month.

‘A Feast of Vultures’ is a 2016 book by Indian investigative journalist, Josy Joseph. The author says it is “an angst-ridden narrative on the distortion of our democracy.” It is a story told in frightening details of how politicians, business people and shadowy principalities buy and sell and proceed to own that country. He could as well be referring to Nigeria. That is the picture I got when Tinubu held the microphone in Osogbo last week and, with cavalier affection, cuddled vulture as the totem of our democracy: “They want to victimize us, but the rains have been beating our vulture for a long time. Despite the rains, vulture has not died; it has not fallen ill but has been taking offerings and eating sacrifices. Try vulture again, if it will not eat sacrifices.” Indeed, what we have seen since this naira nonsense is enough to make carrion of a nation – food for vultures. And the coming election is a definite feast for hungry carnivores and impatient ravens. Raptors of all hues are already in the skies, wheeling and doing deals. They’ve made of the country a living dead – what the Romans called vivi mortui. As my US-based professor told me, with every sector in turmoil, it is almost impossible to help Nigeria. “The country has become a low trust society. No one can fix a low trust family, a low trust community, a low trust nation. If a family runs on a low trust, each time the man leaves the house, it is wahala; each time the woman leaves, wahala. You remember Evans, the billionaire kidnapper? In Nigeria, I change my drivers as I change clothes because I don’t know when one has become Evans.” But a day is enough for a bad choice to act really badly. Indeed, the next president of Nigeria may be an Evans – unless a Deus ex Machina descends to arrest the free-fall.

‘Cashless’ has a new meaning in Nigeria. It means having money in your bank account but having no access to it because either the banks have no cash or bankers are hoarding cash and the banks’ online platforms are down. I was at my bank on Friday to cash the N20,000 withdrawal limit decreed by the CBN. I was offered a limit of N2,000. I excused myself and left with smiles. I remembered 1984. Nigerians prayed against shame but shame has shot down that prayer; the focus now is how to survive this regime of pains. People now use naira to buy naira: they transfer one thousand, five hundred naira to get cash of one thousand naira; or they transfer 11 thousand naira to get 10 thousand naira cash. What really is the cost of being a Nigerian living in Nigeria?

Leaders are like bank notes; the more you recycle them, the dirtier they come. I compared notes with a friend on the 1984 experience and we agreed that despite the horrible experience of that time, it was still better managed than the fiasco we have in 2023. In 1984, local government sole administrators were directed to act as bankers for rural folks where there were no banks. And there are no records of theft of poor people’s money. The council bosses collected old notes from the unbanked and gave them their values in new notes. There will be a festival of laughter if a governor suggests that arrangement today. Everyone blames everyone else for our crisis of existence. PDP blames APC; APC blames PDP; the president and the CBN blame commercial banks for the scarcity of naira notes. Everyone with links to the kitchen is denying knowledge of how the kitchen knife got lost.

In November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized absolute power and established a dictatorship in France. Freedom lovers groaned and grumbled. But, 52 years later, in 1851, the people watched and hailed as his nephew, Napoleon III, seized absolute power again; then Max dropped his eternal words that have become a warning in all seasons of anomie: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Do we have a third chance? American art historian and critic, Hal Foster, in 2020, wrote the book ‘What Comes after Farce?’ I adopt his words and ask what comes for Nigeria after this farcical farce?

Strictly Personal

Help! There’s a dangerous, secret plot to save the EAC from imminent death, By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Published

on

In an interview with NTV Keny, at the start of the week, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame painted a rather bleak picture of the East African Community (EAC).

 

He suggested the saga of the East African Regional Force (EACRF) to the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which was kicked out ignominiously by a disgruntled government in Kinshasa, was a low point. He said to date, no one has even bothered to formally brief the EAC heads of state on what happened.

 

This debacle, coming on the back of numerous ugly trade and diplomatic spats, despite the latest expansion to include Somalia as the eighth member of the bloc, does not inspire a lot of confidence about the EAC’s future. In Kampala, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni, once the choir leader of the EAC, no longer gets so excited about it.

 

Good East Africans are looking on with alarm. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-East-African Ugandan lawyer wrote to say he has conceived of a plan that will get regional leaders to fall into each other’s arms and turbo charge unification.

 

He plans to arouse patriotic East Africans to establish a radical revolutionary front called the East African Liberation and Unification Front (Ealuf) to work regionally to pressure the governments in Nairobi, Dodoma, Kampala, Kigali, Kinshasa, Juba, Gitega (the newish Burundi political capital), and Mogadishu with an alternative political structure. Ealuf will look to create an East African Peoples Republic.

 

It will have an agenda to abolish all restrictions on travel across borders, have zero tax rates for regional trade, create a regional digital currency, and create a roaring common market, among other things.

 

He believes the leaders will come together at 6G speed, and work hand in hand to stop the ideas espoused by Ealuf from gaining political traction, with its grand vision of a truly meaningful borderless East Africa. In the process, they will move forward with integration to Ealuf.

 

It is likely too, that they will not come together to collectively save their jobs. They might form an East African Emergency Unity Summit (EAEUS), to fight back. President Museveni might want to chair it as the region’s “elder statesman”, having been in power for nearly 40 years.

 

However, some leaders would oppose him, saying he has eaten for long at the top, and should let a younger leader, “new blood”, like Burundi President Évariste Ndayishimiye, or Kenya’s William Ruto, lead it. They will accuse him of scheming to install himself as the East African supreme leader, and clinging on to power until one of his grandchildren was ready to take over from him.

 

Museveni will push back, citing their inexperience. Some will demand that South Sudan President Salva Kiir pay all the arrears his country owes the EAC before it gets full rights in EAEUS. DRC President Felix Tshisekedi will push to exclude President Kagame from taking a seat until Rwanda stops its support for M23 rebels. President Kagame will tell him to go and swim with crocodiles in the Congo River.

 

Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud will complain that the other leaders are disrespecting him because he is an EAC newbie, and until they change their attitude, he is staying in Mogadishu.

 

As they squabble, some groups might see an opportunity. Al Shabaab might reform, disavow violence, elect new moderate leaders and seek to ally with the regional integration activists as Ealuf-Horn of Africa.

 

In M23 allies with some of the 120 rebel groups and form Ealuf-Congo Basin. A bid by externally based Ugandan groups like a rump Lord’s Resistance Army emerging from the forests of the Central African Republic, and the Allied Democratic Forces in the eastern DRC is rejected, because they have failed to demonstrate good faith credentials.

 

Meanwhile, Ealuf is spreading like wildfire. Large numbers of Ealuf are reported to have hired boats near Entebbe in Uganda, and Mwanza in Tanzania sailing fast on Lake Victoria and converging on Kisumu, where local integrationist forces have mobilised and turned the city into a hotbed of East African unification. In DRC, bands are composing new songs praising the new people’s unification efforts. Young people are organising to link their hands along the half of the 770-kilometre Kenya-Tanzania.

 

All over East Africa, there are reports of high school boys and girls disappearing in large numbers to join Ealuf cadre training camps.

 

Traders are staging solidarity rallies and vowing to divert the taxes they pay to states to Ealuf, and stories of market women all over the region raising money and sending food to the heroic mobilisers are spreading far and wide.

 

International comrades from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia are arriving in large numbers in East Africa and joining. Word leaks that some of the EAC presidents are sending out feelers, seeking to meet with Ealuf to cut deals. There are rumours that they are paying some Ealuf leaders big money to defect. The hardliners in Ealuf reject the olive branches, and there is some division in the ranks and a witch hunt for the “traitors,” who are eating money from the presidents.

 

Ealuf recovers and marches on. EAEUS reaches out with an official offer to sit down and dialogue with Ealuf about the formation of an East African Amalgamation. Whether they stick together or get divided, the leaders lose. But Ealuf has only won the first round. This is not over by any means.

 

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3

Continue Reading

Strictly Personal

Is Nigeria’s security challenge intractable? By Jide Ojo

Published

on

Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution says the security and welfare of citizens shall be the primary purpose of the government. Quite unfortunately, successive administrations have failed to meet these requirements, and the current Bola Tinubu administration is equally failing. Right now, instead of people’s standard of living improving, it is depreciating and everybody is worried about the intolerable level of insecurity in this country.

This newspaper, in its editorial of Monday, March 11, 2024, chronicled the spate of mass abductions that have recently taken place in the country. It stated, “Within the past week, Boko Haram insurgents and bandits have successfully abducted over 404 Nigerians across three North-East and North-West states. This is unparalleled and ominous for the rest of the fragile country. For the President, it calls for a swift re-evaluation of the subsisting national security strategies, which appear ineffective against the hordes from hell perpetrating this criminality.”

It went further, “Indeed, it is the familiar Salafist modus operandi all over again: The predation on women, pupils, and other soft targets. Fifteen pupils of an Islamiya school in Sokoto State were kidnapped in the early hours of Saturday. This is less than 72 hours after 287 schoolchildren were abducted from the LEA Primary School in Kuriga, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State. A few days before the Kaduna incident, over 200 female internally displaced persons were forcefully taken away by terrorists in three IDP camps in Borno State. The women were kidnapped in Ngala, the headquarters of Gamboru Ngala, while fetching firewood in the bush to sell.” The PUNCH submitted that, “Data indicates that about 1,548 schoolchildren have been abducted in 11 separate incidents of mass abduction by terrorists and bandits in northern Nigeria between April 2014 and June 2021.”

What are the implications of insecurity in Nigeria? First, it hampers economic growth and development. Many businesses have shut down due to these ceaseless kidnappings, banditry and insurgencies. Many of those internally displaced have lost their means of livelihood and have become economically dependent on the government and charity organisations. Thus, rather than contributing to economic growth, they become liabilities. There is now low investor’ confidence in Nigeria, as no foreign investor will want to come and set up business in a volatile country like ours unless they are into the sales and marketing of security gadgets and bulletproof vehicles.

Insecurity is also one of the drivers of the ‘japa’ phenomenon, as many Nigerians besiege embassies of foreign countries to flee their fatherland. Many don’t even bother to go to embassies; they simply embark on a hazardous journey of being trafficked through the desert and the Mediterranean Sea, hoping to irregularly migrate to Europe for safety and a better life.

I saw a journalist friend of mine sometime in January after a long while. As we chatted, I asked how he was coping with the astronomic rise in the cost of living. He sighed and said it had not been easy. I then complimented him on living in his own house in Abuja when I, who had been in Abuja for over 20 years, still lived in a rented apartment.  He corrected me and said he had fled his house in the Bwari area of Abuja due to the incessant raids of kidnappers in his community and is now living in a rented apartment like me. That’s how insecurity has also impacted family life. Imagine the pain of having to relocate from your home, not because of any natural disaster like an earthquake or flood but due to the activities of bandits.

Food inflation, which has risen above 35 percent, is also a result of food production shortages linked to the activities of bandits who not only demand access and harvest fees from farmers but routinely raid farm settlements to abduct, maim and kill the farmers who are feeding the nation.  Health-wise, many Nigerians are suffering from panic attacks, paranoia, schizophrenia and trauma as a result of the scary news of abductions and acts of terrorism being daily reported in the media. Many of us could no longer sleep with our eyes closed. In many communities, people now live in fortresses and under self-imposed curfews. As described by the renowned English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book titled Leviathan “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It is not as if the federal and state governments have been standing akimbo, watching helplessly. Funding for security and defence has increased exponentially. According to the earlier referenced editorial of this newspaper published on Monday, “The Federal Government, as part of efforts to keep the country secure, disbursed N231.27 billion to procure arms and ammunition for security agencies and officers between 2020 and 2024. This is beside the yearly budgets of the Ministry of Defence and eight other forces between 2020 and 2022, put at N11.72 billion, N10.78 billion, and N9.64 billion, respectively. More recently, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the government procured N5 trillion worth of tanks and armoured fighting vehicles for the security forces, per the NBS report ‘Foreign Trade in Goods Statistics.’ This is in addition to other security hardware.”

The Muhammadu Buhari administration established the Police Equipment Trust Fund just as a handful of states have similarly done. Many states have established vigilantes or state-owned security agencies, with the latest being Zamfara State, which early in the year established Community Protection Guards. Recall that the six south-west states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo and Osun, on January 9, 2020, established Amotekun to fight insecurity. Consideration has been given to the establishment of state police, with a committee set up to come up with a framework.

With all these aforementioned initiatives, why is Nigeria still largely insecure? The answer to this can be found in the hardware solutions without a significant component of the software solutions. I daresay that even the hardware efforts have been largely ineffective due to a lack of sufficient well-trained and motivated security personnel. We have not also adopted technology-driven security solutions. There are several modern tech gadgets such as satellite orbiters, drones, CCTV, scanners, jammers, communication gadgets and forensic laboratories, that Nigerian security forces do not have or have in insufficient quantities.

On the software side, unless and until we frontally tackle the challenges of unemployment, poverty and hunger, whatever hardware equipment we acquire will not resolve our security challenge. These variables drive crimes and criminality. People will not blink an eyelid to commit crimes if they are starving. The popular adage is also that an idle hand is the devil’s workshop. If people are not gainfully employed and are poor, they will constitute a nuisance and danger to the rest of society.

I think the time has come for the Nigerian president to seek international assistance to bring the security challenge effectively under control. We should also mobilise our able-bodied retired security personnel to help combat the increasing insecurity. There is also a need to do something about our porous borders, where small arms and light weapons are indiscriminately smuggled into the country and used by bandits to terrorise innocent Nigerians.

Continue Reading

EDITOR’S PICK

Metro10 hours ago

Zimbabwe in food shortage as El Nino drought strikes harder

Residents of the Zimbabwean community of Buhera are waiting in groups outside a primary school, hoping to be called by...

VenturesNow10 hours ago

World Bank consortium to give Egypt $6 billion over a 3-year period

The World Bank Group on Monday announced that it planned to give Egypt, which has been suffering from a foreign...

Musings From Abroad10 hours ago

Explain dire consequences of Rafah operation to Israel, Egypt urges UN, US

Following Washington’s objection to a military incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah on its border with Egypt, Egypt’s...

Sports12 hours ago

Controversy as US-based former Kenyan football star Joseph Asuza commits suicide

A US-based former Kenyan football star, Joseph Asuza, has reportedly committed suicide in what has been described as tragic circumstances,...

Tech13 hours ago

ADB signs $15m transaction guarantee facility with Zimbabwe’s NMB Bank

The African Development Bank (ADB) has signed a $15 million Trade Finance Transaction Guarantee Facility with Zimbabwe’s NMB Bank aimed...

Culture13 hours ago

Kenyans mourn passing of prominent TV star, Rita Tinina

Kenyans, especially those within the country’s media space, have been thrown into mourning following the sudden death of veteran television...

Metro15 hours ago

Zambia receives $100m World Bank grant to support energy sector

The Zambian government has announced receiving a $100 million grant from the World Bank Group to support its energy sector....

VenturesNow18 hours ago

Nigeria targets fresh $1 billion loan from World Bank 

In order to address the issues facing internally displaced persons and their host communities, as well as to support rural...

Tech18 hours ago

Ghana’s communications regulator predicts subsea cable repairs could take five weeks

According to Ghana’s communications regulator, it will likely take at least five weeks to fully restore service relying on the...

Metro20 hours ago

‘You won’t go unpunished’, angry Tinubu vows justice for slain Nigerian soldiers

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has vowed to get justice for 16 soldiers who were killed by youths of two warring...

Trending