Stopping Nonsense!

STOPPING NONSENSE!

A Collection of Writings and Thoughts of

Olisaemeka Akukwe

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodies in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-978-992-410-3 Published by Vivian Akukwe [email protected] www.olisaemekaakukwe.org

Cover Picture by i_am_zews/shuttershock.com Cover Design by Friday Ogbali Davis Stopping Nonsense!

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents List of Abbreviation Foreword Introduction 01

PART 1 05 Vision 2020 and the New Society 06 Don’t Blame Emefiele, Blame Buhari 19 Igbo Enwe Eze 23 National Character Vs Federal Character: World Cup Lessons 28 Christmas Message to Ndi Igbo 32 My Fear 40 Nigeria’s Health System and National Well Being 57 Rethinking the National Health Insurance Scheme 61 Ostrich Nation 72 Radical Islam and the Globalization of Terror 75 Syllabus of Deceit (The Truth about the First Coup) 81 Who will tell the President? 86 Why Biafra will not go away (Part One) 91 Why Biafra will not go away (Part Two) 97 Facts Don’t Lie: Reign of Error 109

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Reign of Error: The Public Sector 121 Wounded Hope: Elections in Nigeria 132 Lead Us Not Into Temptation 137 Damascus Experience Continues 142 Atiku/Obi – An Excellent Choice 145 Hand Me Down Policy 149 It’s Morning Yet 152 Oge Adiro – Politics for Re-Structuring 160 Rigging for Dummies: The Playbook 164 Rigging is not ‘Uncommon’ in America 169 Turkey is the Template 176 Why Jerusalem? … The diplomatic Golgotha Part 1 181 Why Jerusalem? … The diplomatic Golgotha Part 2 185 On Biafra … Ka Akpaa ya Akpa 193 Theory of Black Swan Events 196 Public-Private Partnership and Vision 2020 198 Mass Housing Initiative: An Approach 205 Democracy: The Electoral Process We Deserve 227 The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church in Nigeria 238 One Easter Day in Enugu 245 Can’t Cope, Mbok! 249

PART 2

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INTERJECTIONS 252 Pondei Syndrome and the Balm of Gilead 253 Single Narrative Syndrome 254 Look in the Mirror People. Single Narrative is Dangerous 257 The Clock is Ticking 258 In Remembrance 260 … Still on Changing the Narrative 262 Pot calling Saucer Black 265 … Trending Tale 267 Waiting for the Cat to Bark 269 Are you done talking? 270 My answer to a post on ‘Political Islam’ 272 Move Forward! 274 Start Work in Earnest 275 It’s a Natural Extension! 276 The Vultures are Gathering 277 Boycott will Not Force Government to Negotiate 278 Why Celebrate? 280 Ka a Kpaa Ya Akpa! 281 Categories of Biafran Supporters 282 March of Folly 284 The Damascus Experience 286 #Dasukigate: May it not be inconclusive 287 Far from Uhuru 289 The Trending List 291

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Good morning Chuba! 292 1st October… 296 Bilie VS IPOB – O Gini Na Ese? 297 Census 299 Ndi Igbo, Ikuku kuo, afu ike okuku 301 Why the North made Obasanjo President in 1999 303 Response to a Yoruba Friend 306 Terrorism Dynamics 309 Kindergarten Society 311 Let Merit Ring! 313 CBN is the problem, NOT Importers. 314 There they go again 317 Nothing wrong in borrowing brilliance! 319 Nke a bu nke anyi 320

ABOUT OLISAEMEKA 321

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

GDP Gross Domestic Product b.p.d barrels per day SW South West SE South East NC North Central NW North West SS South South NE North East VP Vice President SP Senate President GEJ Goodluck Ebele Jonathan PDP Peoples’ Democratic Party APC All Progressive Congress APGA All Progressive Grand alliance CJ Chief Judge CJN Chief Justice of Nigeria rtd Retired Gen General AEPB Abuja Environmental Protection Board ICJ International Court of Justice UN United Nations EFCC Economic and Financial Crimes Commission

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HOA House of Assembly HOR House of Representatives ACN Action Congress of Nigeria AC Action Congress US United States BH Boko Haram EU European Union PPP Public Private Partnership CBN Central Bank of Nigeria INEC Independent National Electoral Commission FEDECO Federal Electoral Commission NEC National Electoral Commission IPOB Indigenous People Of Biafra MASSOB Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra FG Federal Government DSS Department of State Services NPF Nigeria Police Force OIC Organization of Islamic Cooperation NCNC National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons NPP Nigerian Peoples’ Party NASS National Assembly CIA Central Intelligence Agency

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UPN Unity Party of Nigeria NPN National Party of Nigeria GNPP Great Nigeria People’s Party FCT Federal Capital Territory PMB President Muhammadu Buhari NHIS National Health Insurance Scheme HMO Health Maintenance Organisation NHS National Health Service AG Action Group NEPU Northern Elements Progressive Union FIRS Federal Inland Revenue Service VAT Value-added Tax NBS National Bureau of Statistics PMS Premium Motor Spirit (Petrol) FDI Foreign Direct Investment OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprises LGA Local Government Area EVS Electronic Voting Systems

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FOREWORD

bout five months before the passing on of Olisaemeka Francis Akukwe, I had a difficult Adiscussion with him. The discussion was difficult for one reason and I had mulled over it for a long time before I finally had the courage to raise it. I asked him if he had given thought to collecting his writings and publishing them. I told him that it would be a shame that these thoughts disappear and can no longer be found. His wife was there and partook in the long silence which followed my question. In the simplicity of my question, I had somewhat broached the issue of death. Being quite ill at that time, I believe that the reality or possibility of death was quite palpable to him and to me.

He broke the silence by saying simply that it would be a good idea. We spoke of the scattered mediums, from Facebook to newspapers where his thoughts on various topics had been published. It dawned on me after this discussion that this was a task I was willing to put off for as long as it takes. Perhaps, by putting off this gathering of some of his words in one bushel, feelings about his mortality would become less tangible.

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The reality of his passing on re-ignited a quest that had been chosen and a promise that had been made. But it was Vivian Akukwe, who had for long been his faithful typist that the onus of this compilation would lie on. The labour of love of seeking out the scattered pieces of the memories of her husband was hers to claim. This compilation is therefore mostly her doing.

These writings however do not do justice to the extensiveness of the writings of Olisaemeka Akukwe. It is my hope that as years pass by, and as more of his writings continue to surface, the public will be availed of the thoughts of this brilliant mind. Though he wrote for his country mostly, his outlook was beyond it. His visions drew their inspiration from different fields of knowledge where he was more than a mere spectator. Though this work is not meant to be sold, it would be great if the reader can seek out and donate to the Olisaemeka Akukwe Center for Imaging and Knowledge. This will ensure that Nigerian researchers of all ages will have access to his massive collection of rare books.

Nnamdi Okose

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Introduction

here are millions of books, probably, speaking to the socio cultural problems of the most Tpopulous African country- Nigeria. Every thinker across the ages has tried to decipher the riddle of why Nigeria, which should have been a great country cannot seem to get things right. A giant still in the throes of self-realization, Nigerians have been frustrated about this mystery of poverty in the midst of many blessings.

The acclaimed author Chinua Achebe puts the blame squarely on the doorstep of political leadership in Nigeria. He affirms that: “There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the inability to rise to the challenge.”

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The above declaration by Achebe gives an information that many Nigerians already have. Everyone blames the leadership for the problems and rightly so. However, in the cacophony of the army of voices criticizing, we sometimes lose focus of the need to provide solutions. And this is where Olisaemeka Akukwe comes in. His writings are not only prophetic but they provide a possible path for redemption. This dual prophetic and teaching quality can be seen from the very first essay written in 2009 and which lays out the path the Nigerian government must follow if it is to achieve the often touted Vision 2020. This article was written when Nigeria had not as it is now, fallen into the terrorizing grip of Boko Haram and other terrorist. In the essay, Olisaemeka wrote these dire words: “These potentially uneducated and under-employed millions in the north can easily be recruited into an ‘army of hate’ by charlatans acting under the banner of religion. They can easily be persuaded to unleash mayhem on the perceived oppressors, who to them includes anybody who is ‘doing well’. When you live in generational poverty, life seems like a Zero- Sum game.” This prophetic streak is replete in the whole book.

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Olisaemeka’s genius is not that he can decipher Nigeria’s socio political and economic problems, it is in the refreshing views he brings to the solutions. This maverick possesses a rare gift of taking complex issues and unknotting them with simple and uncomplicated language. Olisaemeka questions popular ethnic opinions by drawing astonishing similarities with things the ordinary person can relate to. These metaphors, sometimes astonishing unravel the complexity of the problem while pointing to the solution. Still Olisaemeka is not unaware of the issues surrounding the Igbofolk in Nigeria and revisits some of the long held misgivings for this tribe. There is a second part of the book which contains shorter banters and arguments. Though these are not long essays, they provide compacted information and insight even as useful as the long essays. This book, and the fresh and insightful ideas within it will one day become a reference book for political scientists, policy makers, economists and everyone who is interested in making a change in governance. If you are someone who has one time or the other lost sleep

03 Stopping Nonsense! about the problems troubling Nigeria or Africa and what the solutions could be, then you have opened the right book.

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PART 1

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VISION 2020 AND THE NEW SOCIETY.

October 2009

“For lack of vision, my people perish”, so enthused the Christian holy book. ‘In spite of visions, my people perish’ is the Nigeria reality. Or so it seems. We have had litany of visions in Nigeria wearing different robes. Everybody ‘knew’ there will be “housing for all in the year 2000.”

Everyone ‘knew’ there will be “health for all in the year 2000.” It’s 2009 now, I think. And the visions have been fast forwarded to 2020, with the typical panel beating. Top 20 economy in 2020!

Arresting vision. Inspiring. Exhilarating. Intoxicating. If you would come with me a while, I would like us to examine the kind of society Nigeria should be in 2020; assuming we achieve a Top 20 status among economies.

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Probably we may glimpse the changes we may need to do today; and ask ourselves if we are collectively ready for the challenge.

For Nigeria to be in the top 20 economic chart, her GDP will need to expand from about $214 billion to about $600 billion in 2020. Currently, Sweden , Belgium and Poland are ranked 20th, 19th, and 18th respectively. Poland is the new comer in the top 20, displacing Indonesia that was 20th in 2007. Achieving a $600 billion economy is not impossible, but improbable in Nigeria , except an annualized GDP growth of 12% is sustained for the next 11 years. This is the crux of the issue! For Nigeria to attain 12% average annual GDP for the next 11 years, she must become a vastly different society! Do the leaders have the intellectual rigour, moral probity, and honest courage to re-invent the society?

On physical infrastructures, we currently have about 200,000km of roads (tarred and untarred). Only about 30,000km of these roads are tarred, a mere 15%. By 2020 we will need about 386,000kms of roads, with about 270,000 kilometers of them (70% of total) tarred, if the

07 Stopping Nonsense! vision is on course. We currently have about 70 airports with about 36 of them having paved runways. We will need about 180 airports, with over 100 of them having paved runways by 2020, if the vision is on course. Domestic oil consumption may likely be above 2.0 million b.p.d as against about 300,000 b.p.d today. At the current production rate of about 1.7 million b.p.d, we may become a net importer of oil. This implies the need for production capacity expansion. From the current 2.5 million b.p.d to about 3.5 million b.p.d, if we are to still be a net exporter of oil. By extension, Niger-Delta must become investor and investment friendly; OPEC quotas may have to be abandoned and government dependence on oil revenue must be inevitably depleted. Oil tyranny, which has been the basis for Nigeria government and mis-governance will slow to a crawl. Joint-venture cash call obligations, government – owned NNPC, revenue sharing formulas, oil and resource control laws, etc will all need radical appraisals. Factor in also tripling of Filling stations, Tank farms capacities, and you understand the challenges in this sector alone. The 3000km of rail roads we have now, may need to be expanded to about 10,000

08 Stopping Nonsense! km of modern speed rails. The 4 Seaports cannot handle the volume of exports and imports an over $600 billion economy will require, even after doubling their capacities.

It may be obvious to you that the government resources can never handle these challenges, and therefore Public- Private Partnerships, Private finance initiatives, and concessioning must become the real center-piece of planning.

These changes can only work when founded on a nearly convulsive changes in our current legal and judicial system. From land laws, to court efficiencies, to resource laws, to community rights, to civil service rules, to the archaic and embarrassing evidence acts, etc. Intractable judicial procedures and sometimes putting justice up for auction greatly deters investment capital. Mercurial investment laws are plagues to investment. A judiciary that is biased towards order rather than justice cannot co-habit with a dynamic society that should produce over $600 billion. Remember that a $600 billion economy implies individual, corporate, and public

09 Stopping Nonsense! transactions that may be about four times what we have today. Yet, our judicial system cannot handle the present challenges we face. Thus most Nigerians go for extra- judicial conflict resolution. This includes surrender of rights in one extreme, and assassinations at the other extreme, and everything in between. Without Legal- Judicial reforms today, either the judicial systems truncates the 2020 Vision or it implodes with scandals, sleaze and learned indifference.

In Real Estate, about 8.4 trillion ft2 of Residential space will have to be created between today and December 2020. Also about 4.2 trillion ft2 of commercial and industrial space may be needed. To put this in perspective, we have a cumulative shortfall of about 2.8 trillion ft2 of residential space now. And we need to create about 600 million ft2 of residential space annually. If these real estates and infrastructure demands are to be met, over 40 million square meter of arable land will be lost by farming. Now this is not the issue. The issue is the potential for rife land speculation, insider dealing by land officials, militancy of unemployed, under employed, barely educated youths of the communities

10 Stopping Nonsense! occupying those lands today that may put a handcuff to these developments. So changes in community rights and compensation, land use act, land speculation and taxation, etc are even more urgent today than ever. Other reforms in this sector should include Mortgage Finance and Funding; Import regime on some essential but domestically sub-available building materials like cement; dearth of inter-mediate skills in the housing sector; low capabilities among domestic firms in building technologies for high rise condominiums, etc.

In a modern economy that produces over $600 billion of goods and services, knowledge will be a coveted asset. Creativity, specialized skills will be likely champions in the labour market. Education therefore becomes the workshop of high income and high status. Today in Nigeria , by default of cultural history and ethnic cosmology, the southern part of the nation invests in her human capital by a factor of about 5:1, compared to the north. WAEC enrollment of Imo state alone is higher than the entire northern states. This is despite the fact that public education spending is grossly inadequate in the southern states. However private (sometimes cut

11 Stopping Nonsense! throat) spending in education compensates for this gap. In the north, this culture is peripheral at best. Now this is a crisis for the South and the North. The conventional wisdom is that it is a northern problem. So wrong! If Vision 2020 is achieved, it may produce lots of high paying, high skill jobs which will be filled mainly by southerners. This is a simple extrapolation of current educational aspirations in the country. There will also be plenty low paying, grunt work. These will be filled by the uneducated or poorly educated. If education explosion does not happen in the north, then majority of people filling these ‘grub’ jobs will be northerners- and impoverished immigrants. We do not need a Nostradamus to tell us that the above scenario is a social gun powder. It will only be natural that a poorly educated, ill clad, ill fed, disenchanted gateman from Katsina may see a well groomed, well educated, software programmer from Ogun state, owner of a bungalow in Kaduna, working for a local affiliate of an international firm; as a totem of his oppression. These potentially uneducated and under-employed millions in the north can easily be recruited into an ‘army of hate’ by charlatans acting under the banner of religion. They

12 Stopping Nonsense! can easily be persuaded to unleash mayhem on the perceived oppressors, who to them includes anybody who is ‘doing well’. When you live in generational poverty, life seems like a Zero-Sum game. You think you are losing, because the other person is gaining. This implies that ‘religious’ crisis may begin to take much more gory dimensions, because they are really social crisis under religious flags. To nip these dangers in the bud, it should be the responsibility of the North and South in equal measure to ensure an education revolution in the north. This will create a heritage of opportunity that is national, further aiding the achievement of Vision 2020 and fairly distributing the gains. Any of the typical Nigeria solution of either allowing the gains of over $600 billion economy to accrue to one section because they are better prepared, or of using government fiat to transfer the natural gains of a section to another section a la ‘fair and equitable ‘ distribution will create ricocheting chaos. It is now, that we can institute education, training, and skill acquisition policies that can prevent that acrimony.

Public education spending, as a matter of policy and

13 Stopping Nonsense! future stability should flow more to the north. Reforms of the existing education channels must however be achieved, before this policy of asymmetrical education funding can work. Naturally, Southern leaders may never see the point of this much higher public education spending in the north. We should remember that every society, like any chain, is as strong as its weakest point. At current public spending growth pattern, government spending in all tiers will balloon to about $200 billion by 2020 (about N30 trillion). We are aware of the colossal waste and corruption at the current $50 billion of government spending. At $200 billion, your guess is as good as mine. This implies that without a comprehensive and painful civil service reform and re- invention of governance, we will simply have much, much more of the same. A transparent tax regime with coherent theme and Federal, State, Local harmonization must be developed. Its greatest virtue should be simplicity. Its ultimate aim – development. Development of the private sector; development of deprived areas; development of accountability. Derivation must play a role in all aspects of tax revenue distribution. Deprivation should also be an important

14 Stopping Nonsense! balancing weight. So we must institutionalize DERIVATION and DEPRIVATION FORMULA. I wish to state categorically here, that before legislators, the inland revenue and various executive levels should start a comprehensive tax regime, the oil tyranny and petroleum bureaucracy must end. The oil revenue that government takes and shares is the biggest and most opaque form of taxation any society can ever witness. It explains our amputated dreams since 1970.

What about the family and private challenges? The demands of life in a top 20 economy, cannot be what it is today. Today many women still spend about 90 minutes a day in the kitchen. The challenges we must overcome to produce per capita income of about $3300 dollars (official exchange rate) in 2020 will definitely encroach on such ‘luxuries’. Time spent in the kitchen by women may decline to about 15 minutes a day, with ramifications beyond the kitchen. Ability to cook well, which is in decline, will further fall alarmingly. Consumption of junk foods by everybody will increase. Obesity as a national dilemma will begin to rear its head. This with its hand maidens of diabetes, arthritis,

15 Stopping Nonsense! and heart diseases will further increase the pressure on the creaky health systems. Parents ‘face time’ with children will also decline drastically. Teachers, schools, peers and media will become the major influencers of children and teenagers. These are just to mention some general trends.

We should also ask ourselves, are we ready for the migration and immigration pressures in the urban areas? A thriving economy will be a magnet for citizens of impoverished and war torn African countries, especially in West Africa . So a foreign policy that pro- actively promotes stability in West Africa will be a plain necessity. A comprehensive immigration policy and border control may be necessary. Investment in urban areas, especially in urban slums should be a deliberate policy. We must aim to eliminate slums not by demolition. That is after the fact. But by anticipatory development of potential corridors for low income earners around cities and mega cities. Where slums already exists, innovative developments that will turn the slums into suburbs can always be worked out with the slum dwellers. That urban areas will attract the

16 Stopping Nonsense! poor, the young, and the hungry is natural. Our responsibility is not to be surprised by natural developments, as the planners of Abuja and Lagos woefully realized.

We should also be ready for road tolls in urban areas and highways. Most of the investment on roads, if they will come, will come from private funds. So road pricing will become a common way of life in Nigeria from about 2020, if the Vision is on course. Multi-level parking and parking fees will also become common. Car ownership in Nigeria has been growing close to the economic growth rate because of poor public transport system. We may also expect to spend 20% of our working hours in a car or bus. Commuting time can only get longer and more harrowing, except if imagination and vigour is applied to urban planning and regeneration. Can we reverse this trend? I do not see how ineffectual leadership can grapple with, much less reverse the trend. The entire nation may have to beg Lagos State for inspiration.

We can go on and on. The purpose is however not a

17 Stopping Nonsense! monologue, but to raise posers for all of us. Do we believe in this Vision 2020? With the ossified political and leadership culture, can we or should we embark on such grandeur? Should we not change the political and electoral process as a starting point? Have the political and technocratic leaders weighed the multi-faceted changes that should undergird such vision, as this piece have illuminated? Do you see the current leadership in the center and at the states possessing the insights, understanding, and empathy that can make this Vision people friendly? Have there been robust engagements between the political/technocratic leadership and leaderships in the religious, traditional, professional, business, academic, youth, women, and trade strata? Or is this just another people perishing , ‘macro-economic’ vision? These are the questions that are bugging my mind. I wonder if they bother you too?

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DON'T BLAME EMEFIELE. BLAME BUHARI.

December 2016

My take!

CBN adopted a policy of no devaluation. Buhari, when in France, said he fully supported CBN non- devaluation policy! CBN banned forex sales for 42 items. Buhari, in same France, affirmed full support for that policy.

My opinion is that Emefiele AND Buhari are guilty of economics incompetence!! No shielding Buhari here, except out of political or tribal prejudice.

Buhari took 5 months to assemble a team, in a country that was facing fiscal meltdown. That was colossally baffling. American economy was in fiscal and monetary meltdown when Obama took over. No time was wasted

19 Stopping Nonsense! blaming Bush. He quickly arranged the first bail out within 90 days, with borrowed funds.

APC has been moaning about the decline in oil price. But the fact is that oil contributes less than 12% of our GDP! The APC government has been shouting hoarse over stolen government money as reason why they can't deliver. But the fact is that gross government spending is less than 8% of our GDP! In other words, the Buhari/APC fixation on oil and government spending is a product of political incompetence that included PDP, NPN and past military governments. In July last year, I wrote about the shrinking disposable income of Nigerians and its coming consequences. I lampooned the dollar account demonization by this government. The fact is that even CBN uses a "dorm" account called foreign reserve! Why does CBN hold assets in US treasuries etc? Because they also don't have total confidence in the preservation of the value of naira! So the forex reserve is an 'insurance' against sudden or even gradual loss of value!! From the time PDP took over to when APC took over at the Centre, the naira lost about 70% of its value. From 50 naira to a dollar in 1999, to 190 naira to a dollar in 2015! So smart individuals, like CBN, also have a 'forex reserve' in form of dorm

20 Stopping Nonsense! accounts! But CBN clamped down on them while maintaining her own 'dorm' account, in simple terms!!

The policy was doomed from day one because the meta- message to international community is that you will defend the naira. But your arsenal for that defence is paltry 36 billion dollars, less than the broad money supply in the economy. Speculators know it is grossly inadequate to mount a defence of naira, so they simply go short and wait. Today the parallel market is indicating the actual value. And the future market is even pointing to 315_to the dollar.

China lost over 600 billion dollars since April last year, defending the rhenminbi (Yuan). She can because she had a reserve of near 4 trillion dollars, currently depleted to about 3.3 trillion dollars. And the Chinese are in crisis mode now and are using managed float for their currency!! Now compare to Nigeria with 36 billion dollars as at the start of this regime wanting to fix the naira value! The truth is that the government is simply bankrolling the forex needs of the biggest business people, while leaving over 170 million Nigerians in the lurch.

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Private consumption is about 65% of our GDP, but APC government and Nigeria economists see consumption as a crime. There are myriads supply shocks within the economy that mitigates boosting the domestic expenditure that constitutes the significant part of our GDP. Power, Transportation, Security, Accommodation, Administration are just a few of them.

If we had a competent government now, we won't be wringing our hands! If we had competent governments before, we won't be here.

But the buck, today, stops at Gen Muhammad Buhari (Rtd)'s table!!! No bucking it.

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IGBO ENWE EZE! A persisting Myth.

November 2015

Everybody "knows" that the Igbos don't have a leader. Igbo enwe Eze. I think this is a myth.

Igbos have proven, time after time, that this is not a reality. The problem is that other cultures in Nigeria wish to impose their indices of leadership on ndi Igbo. The Igbo people have a distinct flavour of leadership. Unlike what obtains in many other tribes in Nigeria, ours is NOT hierarchical. It is firmly rooted on merit!!! It does not imply that all the leaders in Igbo land are products of merit. Many men and women were imposed on hapless Igbos, as leaders. Or rather boss. But we never could accept them as leaders. Despite how often they parade or parrot their Igbo leadership "credentials". This is because Ndi Igbo have a cosmic understanding of their type of leadership.

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Any person who will lead Ndi Igbo in any field of endeavour, must first distinguish himself above all peers in that field. No matter how high a person is placed on a pedestal in Igbo land, it can never translate to true, unstinting, vernacular, cosmological leadership of the Igbo masses; except she or he be enormously distinguished in that field of leadership. This is who we are. And this is what is often mistaken as a Leaderless polity. Some examples:

ZIK. Ndi Igbo followed the Owelle of Onitsha, in Politics, for over 4 decades!!! From the late 1940s to mid 1980s, Nnamdi Azikiwe was the quintessential Igbo leader in Politics. He regularly commanded undiluted majority in Igbo land and Igbo enclaves across Nigeria. Even when Ndi Igbo knew he had little chance of clinching the presidency, they followed him. We knew he was the most consummate politician of his time. And for all his ambivalence, we also knew he was Igbo. His parties NCNC and NPP in the 60s and 80s won Igbo land, fair and square. In the 2nd republic, he was the last entrant into the political race. Yet he swept the Igbo heartland, the current 5 states.

Igbos followed Zik. Provided the field was politics!

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Ndi Igbo followed Ojukwu!! We stood with him all through the Civil strife. He represented the Igbo emancipation. He was congruent about Igbo freedom. He never hesitated to speak or fight, for igbos. He was also a soldier. Igbos understands that a freedom fighter must speak and act the rhetorics of freedom fighting! In this, Ojukwu was head, shoulders and waist above his peers. There was no hesitation. No double take. No doubt. No appeasement. No compromise. No hold barred. This is the essence of emancipation struggle. He embodied it. And Ndi Igbo knew. We followed him. For good or ill. We followed. Because he was congruent in that struggle, over the years.

Ralph Uwazuruike failed this test. He couldn't rise above his peers. He was not congruent. A freedom fighter does not follow the middle ground. He must hug the peripheries otherwise he would just be seen as an attention seeker. Uwazuruike's rhetorics was not fiery enough. His method was too mainstream. So Igbos couldn't take him serious enough. He failed to lead in that area.

But Nnamdi Kanu learnt. He is hugging the periphery. His rhetorics resonates with his struggle. He is making

25 Stopping Nonsense! rasping progress in building momentum! Many Igbo youths now look up to him. He is gradually gaining credibility, in the area of Igbo emancipation. This is a reality. I like to deal in realities, whether palatable or not. Nigeria has an option of changing or IPOB will continue to grow.

But for Ndi Igbo, Ojukwu was not a political leader. Zik towered above him in Politics. But Ojukwu was the greatest Igbo leader. In the sense that he embodied the Igbo struggle.

So Ndi Igbo has an advanced concept of leadership. And it is based on crystal clear merit!!!

KANU Nwankwo can lead us in matters relating to soccer. But if he wants to transfer that to politics, we will give him several seats. This is the Igbo way.

Chukwuma Soludo can lead us in economic rebuilding of Igbo land. But if he wants to lead the IPOB, anyi enye ya oche. Fr Mbaka can tell us the way to heaven. Show us the faith that heals. But if he wants to tell us who to vote for, we smile and pass.

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This is the Igbo way of leadership. In Nigerian politics, as of today, no Igbo politician has risen heads and shoulder above his peers. Many of them rose to visibility by wading through the innocent blood of fellow igbos. We know. Many were foisted on us by ndi ugwu. We know.

When that Igbo leader who has distinguished himself in Politics, has risen above his peers by merit, has resonance with Ndi igbo; appears, Ndi Igbo will know. And we will follow. Ndi Igbo nwelu Eze. But it is not the type you find in other cultures.

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NATIONAL CHARACTER. VS FEDERAL CHARACTER: WORLD CUP LESSONS

November 2015

Early hours of this morning, the under-17 national soccer team of Nigeria won the world cup, for their age category! The victory was almost déjà vu, as we were along this same paths just 24 months or so, ago.

The young lads left no one in doubt of their superiority, even after a little fumble against Croatia, in the group stages. But the effortless manner by which they clinched the coveted trophy, left no one in doubt not just of their superiority, but even affirmed their supremacy.

It can easily be deduced by all discerning Nigerian, that we probably went to this tournament with our best 18. And for the 5th time, our best 18 was the world's best 18. Looking back to all the time we have earned global, glory, including few hours ago, we have never used the

28 Stopping Nonsense! principles of federal character. From the time we won first gold medal in commonwealth games in the 60's through the first and second Olympic gold, through the Nduka Ugbade led global triumph of '83 to the 4 others that followed, including today. These are global contest were we needed to build teams. Teams to represent the entire country, and bring glory!

Glory! What the country is perennially denied in governance and economics.

I imagine if coach Amuneke was required to use federal character in team selection. Maybe Nwakali will not make this team. Maybe Akpan will have to be sacrificed. Possibly Bamgboye may have watched the tournament on TV, Victor Osimhen may have to wait for 'his turn'. We would have lost all these talents to the suffocating mediocrity of federal character. Likewise players like KANU Nwankwo, Wilson Oruma, Finidi George, Iheanacho, Idah Peterside, etc who rose through the youth merit selection, would all have languished. Unfortunately, millions of Nigeria's talents are today languishing because of institutional mediocrity and constitutional nepotism. Nigeria codified improper team selection for governance. In the quest to keep a

29 Stopping Nonsense! section down, the country chained itself to moribund confusion. Instead of selecting the best for governance, in all tiers of government, it selected the rest. And we wonder why glory eludes the land?

In the place of federal character, we should institute NATIONAL CHARACTER! This should entail setting a standard minimum merit level, that is the same across the 36 states and FCT. In tertiary admission, military admission, civil service admission etc. A common entry standard, set in line with global benchmark. We just competed globally and won! So we can domesticate global standards, for our youths, irrespective of tribe and religion, and they will win. 40 years of all manner of affirmative actions have not helped the section of the country it was designed for. It can't work. It will only create two things. 1 Entitlement mind-set for the beneficiaries. 2. Resentment by the groups that are imperilled.

This is the tragedy of federal character. National character picks the best from wherever they are. National character engenders the confidence that flows from ability. National character can build the youths of this country, who this morning, conquered the world.

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National character is the starting point of restructuring this fractured house called Nigeria.

Up Golden Eaglets! Down Federal Character!

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CHRISTMAS MESSAGE TO NDI IGBO!

December 2015

Merry Xmas to all Igbo people in Nigeria and in the diaspora. Merry Xmas to all our brothers and sisters who are not Igbo. We wish you all joy and profound peace. We all need it.

I write today to my Igbo folks in general, and the activists for Biafra in particular. It is no news that the entire nation has realised that the agitation for Biafra is not a Facebook fad or a social media past time. It is a real and pulsating desire for release from a dysfunctional union that has watered the soil of the 'one nation' mantra with the blood and sweat of umu Igbo.

This feat was greatly enabled by IPOB strategies, including the smart media tactics of Director Nnamdi Kanu. Love him or hate him, messr Kanu has left his

32 Stopping Nonsense! mark in the incomplete lore of Ndi Igbo. Today, he is hostage to an increasingly paranoid government. He has chosen to rather languish in detention than subject himself to an unjust and ineffective judiciary. Nigeria govt has given the Igbo youths a hero. I believe that in the matter of Nigeria vs Nnamdi Kanu; Nigeria will ultimately lose. Just like Mandela vs apartheid South Africa. Whether Nnamdi dies in detention; is released unconditionally or deported; Nigeria government will be the ultimate losers. The genie is out of the 'ite pot'.

But I think it’s time IPOB, MASSOB and other pro-Biafra groups change strategy. What got us here, won’t take us there!

The Biafra actualisation struggle got here by way of hostile, antagonistic rhetorics of Radio Biafra; smart cell organisation of IPOB; simmering anger among Ndi igbo youths and hegemonic disposition of PMB. The ill- advised arrest of Kanu triggered the massive and sustained protests in SE & SS. It forced the entire nation to take notice, in-spite of themselves. It gave the struggle an entirely new hue. It forced the Igbo politicians, past and present, to gasp for breath. It baffled and stunned the Imo governor, who hitherto

33 Stopping Nonsense! thought he has become THE Igbo leader. He was completely ignored both by his citizens; other Igbo governors; the leaders of IPOB & MASSOB and even Ohanaeze leadership. He discovered that power and influence are distinctly separate.

All the protests and resistance culminated in fatal consequences. As has been going on since 1956, the blood of Igbo youths had to be spilled to assuage the cold injustice of a contemptuous government. Hostile fingers of foreign tribes had to pull the triggers of cold blooded murder, to pacify their promoters in high thrones.

As it stands now, I wish that the Igbo activist will evaluate all that has happened and take stock. Its time to count the loss and assess the wins. But just using antagonistic media messages and street protests will not take us there. The mass protests have served a very essential purpose. It has shown the Igbo politicians that they are not really popular. No Igbo politician can command the crowd pulled by the Biafra enigma! It has also shown all other ethnic nations in Nigeria that BIAFRA will not go away! It is now time to explore the meta-messages and craft new strategies.

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The Biafra activists need to decipher 1. Who supports the struggle among Igbos? 2. Who are neutral among Igbos? 3. Who antagonizes the struggle among Igbos? 4. Who supports the struggle among non-Igbos? 5 Who are neutral among non-Igbos? 6 Who antagonizes the movement among non-Igbos? It is from these 6 groups that you tailor strategies for the next phase. But while doing that, we must all acknowledge the fact that for now, we are all Nigerians! Therefore no wanton breaking of the law. No burning of Nigerian flag. No tearing of Nigerian passport. We are not at war with Nigeria. We are not at war with Fulani, Yoruba, Junkun or anybody for that matter.

For me, I simply want a fair and just nation. No institutional discrimination. If Nigeria can undergo the fundamental and radical changes required for this, then we welcome it. As it stands now, Nigerian leaders are mainly beneficiaries of these institutional nepotism. So Biafra remains a very attractive alternative for most Igbo youths.

For the group 1 above, IPOB needs to develop a database. This group includes most Igbo youths in Igbo

35 Stopping Nonsense! land and beyond. IPOB and MASSOB have to find ways and means to continually engage them. And empower them. With jobs, access to business capital, training and sundry development. To effectively do this, IPOB and MASSOB need to metamorphose. It’s not enough to shout freedom. It’s time for the activists to get into the real nursery of leading change. To lead for productivity. To better the lives of their most ardent believers. To test if they can even lead. To see if they are ready for what they are calling for.

To achieve this, IPOB has to register a political party or adopt an existing one. It is the only way IPOB and Co can escape the toga of quasi-insurgent group. Let them develop an Igbo-centric manifesto, provided it does not antagonise other ethnic nations. Apply for registration. And take it from there. All these grass root support will be wasted if not channelled to a political emancipation purpose. Let us send those who believe in the Igbo independence to the state and federal assemblies, and government houses. Let them be tested! While IPOB remains the nucleus of a new Igbo political awakening. Without political savvy, a negotiated Biafra can never be achieved.

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For the 2nd group, the igbo neutrals, the activists need to woo them, not ignore them! This includes many of the current Igbo politicians, professionals, spiritual leaders, traditional leaders etc. The attitude of ignoring or insulting this group is naive, at best. This struggle must be seen as a contest of opinion. The Biafra activists must hone their arguments. Look at all angles to the issue. Listen with humility to the neutrals to understand them. Learn to gently persuade, with facts and figures. Many of the politicians in this group are only repelled by the volatile intransigence of the Biafran activists. These politicians, especially the younger ones, like Tony Nwoye, Nwala Chude-oracle, Ernest Nwoye, ChukwuEmeka Okose, Ifeanyi Ibezim,etc are very smart people; irrespective of what we think of politicians. IPOB must actively woo people like this. They may end up being the political arrow heads of a renaissance Igbo politics.

For the 3rd group, the antagonistic Igbos, IPOB must restrain from insults and name calling. There are reasons they are antagonistic. Find it. Examine it. Neutralise it. You will find top Igbo politicians (Governors, Senators etc) here. Also big and growing business men and women are in this group. Also many

37 Stopping Nonsense! old Igbo men and women are here. We can never discountenance their objections. It is rooted in experience, rather than contempt. The work of IPOB is cut out here.

For the 4th group, the non-Igbo supporters, IPOB has to show humble appreciation and careful interaction. Biafra, after all, is Igbo-centric. People like Asari Dokuboh and co are among these group. Likewise many people in SS, SW and some in NC. An annual interactive summit will be a useful tool in deepening the growing understanding with this group. Other similar approaches can be developed.

The 5th group, the non-Igbo neutrals, is where the most work may need to be done. This group includes almost all the international community and many Nigerians. I am surprised that IPOB simply ignores or even antagonizes this group. National and global PR firms need to be retained to effectively market the Biafra struggle to this group. Our collective harrowing experience in Nigeria should be showcased to this group. Don’t assume they know! Our aims and potentials should also be promoted. The marketing must be modern, measured and effective. It is not about

38 Stopping Nonsense! ranting. It is not about name calling. The message must be positive and confident. Even when it is a sad tale. Our leaders must also come to terms with some of the ills perpetrated by Biafran soldiers against the minorities, during the war. We know some of the minorities also betrayed the struggle. But we must lead in issuing unreserved apology to all minorities that may have been unjustly treated by the Biafran soldiers. We Igbos are no saints! Let us not pretend we are. It should be part of the strategy of engaging the non-Igbo neutrals.

For the 6th group, the non-Igbo antagonists, we must first forgive them. Then whenever a civilised and non- charged environment exists, we can engage them. Otherwise, we stay out of their bandwidth. We must learn to also treat them with respect, while making our case. It is mainly the converted non-igbo neutrals that can win them over. It will be by diffusion. This struggle cannot be won on radio alone. Or by forcing shops to close. It must be far more sophisticated. I call on all Biafran activists worldwide to read and ruminate on this. Likewise all Igbo people. We are at the forked road. Which path do we tread? What got us here, won’t take us there!

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MY FEAR

April 2016

I remember the campaigns of 1983. I was in primary school, but my fascination with politics and leadership was already well and alive. It was a rally during the early weeks of long vacation, at Ngwo Park, Enugu. On the dais was the mercurial Chief Vincent Ikeotunye; industrious Chief C.C. Onoh, debonair Chief Austin Ezenwa and gentleman Chief Alex Ekwueme. But the major attractions were Chief Emeka Ojukwu, Ikemba Nnewi and the man he was about to introduce: Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Usman Shagari, the then executive President of Nigeria. Shagari came to the microphone, with the characteristic hail of his party, NPN. ‘NPN – Super Power! One nation, one destiny!’ Thus, he delved into a litany of promises.

My fear is that 32 years after General Buhari aborted

40 Stopping Nonsense! that very useful experience in democracy; Nigeria has failed to become one nation. The deeper fear is that it can never become one nation, in fact by current and historical examples; it runs a real and present risk of disintegration. Except the politics, economics and society is fundamentally restructured.

We are about to approach one year of a government, that was elected by about 25% of the registered voters.The general motivation for choosing the current government was change. Unsurprisingly, there was no common agreement on what this mantra connotes. However, I am unshakably convinced that Nigeria needs to change or face its demise. This conviction comes from empirical and anecdotal evidence that abound, for whoever wishes to be objective.

It was Obafemi Awolowo who once described Nigeria as “… geographic description”. Permit me to remind us that every country is ‘mere geographic description’! But some countries have grown to become nations also. Sadly, Nigeria is not one of them.

Nigeria’s boundary is an artificial creation, left behind by the British colonialist. It does not correspond to a

41 Stopping Nonsense! religious, historical, cultural or linguistic entity. This is the reality. We have largely lived as a fake nation, and we know it. No wonder Awo penned those words. Every national policy from 1960 till date has the shadow of this false ‘nationhood’ written all over it. But we are a REAL country, with all the paraphernalia of statehood. The greatest impetus the state has is force! And Nigeria has been kept together by force, rather than by any unifying or over-arching ideology. There is a philosophy that underlies this forceful union, though. It is called CORRUPTION. The Economist magazine said that corruption is the only thing that works in Nigeria.

It is worth pondering the fact that multi-ethnic democracy is the most difficult form of government to sustain. Add to it a multi-religious twist and forceful political conjugation, and you will get a rather combustible mix. We have seen many nations with less fault lines than Nigeria, collapse. Take the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for a start. It was a multi-ethnic nation-state or empire in the 19th century. It had Austria, Hungary, Czech, Croats, Slovenia, and Italy as ethnic nations making it up. It was Bohemia in Czech heartland and Hungary with its rich land owners that bore the economic burden of sustaining the empire.

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Just like the former Biafran homeland in Nigeria. The empire inevitably collapsed with rather violent repercussions. The leaders and regions benefitting from the empire refused to accept the necessary changes, when it was imperative.

The Soviet empire is another example. Many people have forgotten that Soviet Union was an amalgam of several ethnic nations including: Ukrainians, Estonians, Letts, Latvians, Mongolians, some Tartar, Georgians and the anchor ethnic group – Russians. Communism was the ideological glue used by Russia to control and exploit the other nations. Sometimes it can look eerily similar to Hausa-Fulani dominance in Nigeria. That empire, as we know, collapsed under its own weight.

Yugoslavia is a rather disquieting example. It was a multi-ethnic country of Serb orthodox Catholics, Slovenia Roman Catholics, Croatians, plus Kosovo and Bosnia Muslim. They lived in uneasy accord, ensured only by the authoritarian regime of Tito. By early 1990, after the collapse of communism, they began to simmer. Ultimately in December 1990, the DEMOS party of Slovenia won a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia and announced plan to secede in June 1991.

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The Croats followed them. The Serbs (the dominant ethnic group in Yugoslavi) declared war. The rest is common knowledge. Suffice it to say that there is no Yugoslavia today.

Yugoslavia is very instructive because it was the ‘poster boy’ for multi-ethnic democracy in Europe! And it collapsed because its dominant ethnic group was disinclined to restructuring.

In all multi-ethnic countries where such resistance to loose federation failed, war or bloody strife was the result (Bosnia, Croatia, Georgia, Rwanda, etc). Evidence also abound that ethnic nations do rather well, irrespective of resource base or geographic location and size. Think about Israel, Iran, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Armenia, etc. These are all ethnic nations. With the exception of Iran, the rest had to liberate themselves from a suffocating union.

Nigeria will do well to learn from the abundant lessons of history. I see a lot of "Titanic" syndrome in Nigeria. The fundamental fault lines of a multi-ethnic, multi- lingual, multi-religious, and multi-cultural democracy are not being addressed.

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ELECTIONS: It is on record that the greatest flaw of Nigeria’s attempt at democracy has been elections. The aftermath of the massively rigged election of 1964 and the even worse chicanery of the 1965 repeated election in Western region inspired the first coup.

The blatant manipulation of the election of 1983 was the main inspiration for Gen. Buhari’s coup of 1983. The slumpy bungling of June 12 elections in 1993, led to the greatest existentialist threat to Nigeria in modern times. And ultimately Abiola lost his life, besides his mandate. Under Gen Obasanjo, the country witnessed the most brazen electoral malpractices. From 1999 to 2007, rigging could no longer define what went on as elections. The current president, Gen Muhammadu Buhari was twice thrashed in supervised fraud called elections, under Obasanjo. Buhari himself said this. He, in fairness, took the matter to the apex court. They ruled against him in rather controversial rulings. Buhari, though he accepted the judgement, completely disagreed with it.

Today, Buhari is president, because Dr Jonathan allowed a relatively free and fair poll. Yet, the man Jonathan is vehemently vilified by all and sundry in the

45 Stopping Nonsense! ruling party.The wrong lessons are being learned by many youths, the ostensible future leaders. The lesson is ‘Do not sacrifice your ambition for national unity in Nigeria’. The worst possible lesson.From the pathos of a multi-ethnic, winner-take-all, vindictive politics. Today Obasanjo, who twice supervised our most fraudulent electoral mileu, is Buhari’s envoy. Remember the iceberg.

Election has been, and still is, a major fault line in Nigeria. But we must salute the landmark achievement and sacrifice of the former president, irrespective of his other failings.

The other major fault lines in my opinion are corruption and restructuring. My take is that corruption is more a symptom of a badly structured and governed country. Where a distant ‘Lord’ milks resources from a badly neglected ‘vassal’ and redistributes it as he deems fit. In any society, this will create a pervese incentive – Corruption. In Niger Delta, the landlord (indigenes) effectively pays rent to the tenant (federal government). Such is the depth of the deceit.

Nigeria is littered with many underlying policies,

46 Stopping Nonsense! which raise my fear of calamity, if they are not re-visited. I will examine a few of them.

REVENUE FORMULA: I have previously (in a previous article) analyzed how a north-led government accreted almost all revenues previously reserved for the regions and states, to the center. The Nigeria revenue generating and sharing formula is one of its kind in the entire world. You cannot find any country or nation where just about 6 states out of 36, provide 80% federal and distributable income.

You can equally not find where such money spinning regions have to wait for allocation from the center. All oil revenue is taken by the federal government, and 13% of it is later ‘allocated’ to the oil producing region. On VAT, 90% is reserved for distributable pool. There is no country in the world where such formulas are obtained. In multi-regional Spain, which has arguably the most acrimonious multi-region democracy in Europe, the relatively rich Basque region controls most of its (Basque's) tax revenue. It pays the center for services rendered (foreign affairs, defence,monarchy) by negotiated transfer. It controls all other aspects of its society. Yet, they feel aggrieved and Basque separatist

47 Stopping Nonsense! movement has been an enduring reality in Spain. Their grievance, amongst others, is having to subsidize poorer regions like Andalusia in the south and Galicia, in the north. It is also worth mentioning that the regions re-negotiate their contract with the Central Spanish government every five years. And some of them like Basque and Catalonia have autonomy.

Germany has poorer, north eastern states (Landers) like Saxony, Brandenburg, etc in East Germany. But they do not ‘kidnap’ resources from West Germany. Neither is there a 'mysterious' revenue formula used to drain the richer West Germany, for purposes of one united Germany. There are agreed and accepted transfer, from Berlin. Not forced or foisted exploitation.

The Mezzogiorro in Italy is a region of relative poverty. But it does not resort to official extortion to re-distribute income from richer regions.

The Nigeria revenue formula is unsustainable. There is deep resentment in the South-East and South-South of Nigeria over this insolent revenue formula. My fear is that it may have reached a tipping point.

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FEDERAL CHARACTER: In recent days, the supporters of Buhari have been telling the whole world that appointments made by Buhari are based on merit. This was in response to accusations of lopsidedness. I was rather surprised, since federal character, which was championed by the Northern elites, has not been annulled. I wish it was.

Federal character is a classic form of quota system. Some people may regard it as affirmative action. It was initiated by yet another North-led government in Nigeria. It was intended to reserve positions in the federal civil service to disadvantaged states. (Mainly in the North).

It was a crass display of contempt for merit. It was supposed to be affirmative action for minorities, but it has been affirmative action for the majority ethnic group. If the Federal Character Commission can be bold to publish the employment in Federal Agencies and Parastatals by ethnic nationalities, we will be chilled. When Murtala Mohammed first advocated it to the constitution drafting committee in October 1975, it was to give every citizen a sense of belonging in Nigeria. But many observers suspected that it was to balance the

49 Stopping Nonsense! perceived hurdle that merit imposed on ‘disadvantaged’ states. No other multi-ethnic or multi-lingual society (talk less of multi-religious one) applies this type of affirmative action.

India has quota system for her civil service, but it is mainly for the lower cadre. The upper or administrative cadre of the civil service is recruited through one of the toughest exams in the world. It is purely on merit. Belgium has it French-speaking and Fleming speaking population. But recruitment to her civil service is by successfully passing a competitive examination, organized by the federal selection and recruitment office (SECOR).

Canada likewise has English-speaking and French- speaking regions. Till 2003, it used a ‘best-qualified’ critera for recruitment. From 2003, under its Public Service Modernization Act, it now applies a value- based approach. Emphasis is on experience, skill and knowledge for the advertised position. No federal character or ethnic character. In fact in 1984, its commission on Equality in Employment recommended that no quota should be applied in civil service. Rather

50 Stopping Nonsense! specific targets can be set for relevant groups like the disabled, etc. Where did this federal character come from? It is another grievous fault line, that I am afraid could tip the balance against tolerance.

HIGHER EDUCATION: Nigeria is the only country in the world where a federally subsidized tertiary education is not merit-driven. How can we be complaining about the quality of graduates, when only 40% of university and tertiary education is reserved for merit? Imagine that! Higher education in the 21st century is based on sundry considerations like ‘catchment areas’.

When countries are worried about the quality of their higher education and focused on selecting the best. Nigeria is trying to preserve ethnocentric admission policy that rewards tribe and religion and punishes merit and hard work. What kind of nation or country are you expecting to build?

Youngsters from the south can score 200 in JAMB, and fail to gain admission in federal-subsidized institutions. Their counterparts in the north score 66 and get

51 Stopping Nonsense! admitted into choice professional courses. I am yet to see anywhere in the world where this formula is applied. It is straight from the pit of hell. Meanwhile the North is not in anyway disadvantaged in intelligence! Several nations preserve affirmative action for tertiary education, but it is always a low percentage, never exceeding 15%-20%. Reserving 60% of a nation’s university education for considerations, other than merit, in the 21st century, is a recipe for mediocrity. In Nigeria’s case, because these youngsters can easily compare what happens in other climes, resentment builds up. This is another subterranean fault line that has generated tremendous animosity. I am afraid for this country if this continues.

LAND USE ACT: This act effectively transferred ownership of 900,000 square kilometers of Nigeria land to the government. It is Marxist in principle.

In the pre-colonial days, land management was vastly different in the North and South of Nigeria. The North practiced a more feudal system of land maximization within the ancient state. It was uncommon to see small land owners in the North, before the British incursion. This is unlike in the south, from south-east, south-south,

52 Stopping Nonsense! to south-west, where land typically belongs to families and individuals. There were many small land holders (farmers). People typically farmed their land, rather than work in large farms that belong to feudal lords, as was the case in the pre-colonial north.

Today, we have a land policy directly borrowed from the former northern practice. The feudal lord now is the government. This is alien to the typical and customary land management in the southern part of Nigeria. It is a reform whose time has come.

MIDDLE BELT: The middle belt of Nigeria sits atop a two-thousand-foot-high plateau of brown table land. It is the region where the Savannah meets the Sahel. Christianity meets Islam and North meets South. It is a major fault line.

From the inception of civil rule in 1999, more Nigerians have lost their lives in the middle belt violence, than in any other part of Nigeria. This fact is usually lost. The middle belt has borne the major brunt of the pastoral nonchalance of Fulani herdsmen. It has also borne the greater scar of the inter-religious crisis in Nigeria. Resentments run deep among the different antagonist

53 Stopping Nonsense! in this region. The fact that the two major religion in Nigeria are inter-mingled here has hardened the edge of each faith in this region.

The middle belt could have been an earthly paradise, but it is not. There is a perpetual civil war going on there, from Plateau to Nassarawa, from Benue to Kogi, with spillovers. Ambush with fatal consequences is the modus operandi.

My fear is that these fault lines have so much weakened the Nigeria society, though the political super-structure appears to be intact. It is a Potemkin polity. The last election also showed a deeply divided nation.

The middle belt votes were largely split in the states where the fault lines are most evident (Benue, Nassarawa, Kogi, Plateau). The south-west was also split 6:4, while the former Biafran nation and former Sokoto and Borno empires went over 90% for their ‘son’. I want Nigeria to survive. But I want it to survive as a just, fair, equitable nation, that is built on merit and opportunities.

We must tell ourselves the truth. This experiment of an

54 Stopping Nonsense! almost equal Christian and Muslim polity, has never worked anywhere before. It is a product of British imagination. If we want it to work, we must pull down all institutional injustices.

In India, the British attempted to create a single nation of large Hindu and Muslim constituents. Mahatma Gandhi, the idealist, supported the plan. Thankfully, a political pragmatist, in the person of Ali Jinah, was able to persuade the colonialists that the formula was a ticking bomb.

This was why Pakistan was carved out for the Muslims, as a Muslim nation. And India was left for mainly the Hindus. Yet India and Pakistan have fought five wars since 1947. Imagine if they had been one country.

The British made similar mistake in Iraq. It was an artificial creation of incompatible groups: Kurds, Shitte Muslims, and Sunni. They had only been held together by oppressive forceful regimes since 1958. Ethnic and sectarian animosities were forcefully suppressed for decades. Today,Iraq is the global hotbed of vicious violence.

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Nigeria has to look at all these nations, to confirm what does not work. The current structure of Nigeria's politics, economics, and society is not sustainable. We have to look at nations like UK, Canada and India, to learn how to manage a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious democracy.

But my fear is that current leaders are too busy fighting yesterday's battles.

The iceberg is getting closer!

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NIGERIA’S HEALTH SYSTEM AND NATIONAL WELL BEING

JUNE 2015

A healthcare system should meet certain criteria, if it is to be considered modern. According to the Institute of Medicine in USA, these criteria include: Safety Patient – Centered Timely Efficient Effective Equitable The Nigerian health system largely fails in these. This may be largely due to the lack of any real, coherent and comprehensive health system and policy.

From independence in 1960, the Nigeria health policy had been largely stagnant in terms of national, comprehensive initiatives. With the exception of the

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National Primary Healthcare Policy and the National Health Insurance Policy, which were introduced in the 80’s and 2005 respectively, no other coordinated jab at national health coverage can be pointed out.

Both policies have also largely underperformed, leaving Nigeria with unacceptably high child and maternal mortality and rather low life expectancy. More than 95% of Nigerians are still uncovered by any sort of health insurance mechanism, forcing them to resort to out-of-pocket payment for healthcare.

The Nigerian health system is largely administered exclusively by medical doctors, without much recourse to dictates of health economies; financial providence; and post-modern management principles. This had led to poor planning and execution of policies in the health sectors. Among the immediate consequences of this, is the over-burdening of the Nigeria government hospitals; where doctor –patient ratio tends to run to 1:200 and very expensive private hospital care. This arises because of the incentive mismatch and funding gap that exists in the poorly administered national health system.

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Many Nigerian medical and health professionals can be found in various parts of the world, working as high – skilled immigrants. This is a further indictment on the abysmal state of the Nigerian health system. Indeed many wealthy Nigerians have now opted for medical tourism rather than patronise the touchy Nigerian health services. The rising profile of medical tourism is further aggravating the capital flight from Nigeria, according to the Central bank of Nigeria.

Many Nigeria professional associations like the Medical Imaging Society of Nigeria (MISON), Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), etc have also lamented about the poor and dwindling knowledge base of professionals in Nigeria. This is in addition to the most of the best talents leaving the country out of frustration. It appears that in the aspect of health care professionals, Nigeria “…trains the best, but keeps the rest…”

Industrial and labour disputes are another bane of healthcare delivery in Nigeria. An estimate once put it that Nigeria loses about 35 days to industrial dispute in every calendar year. This is definitely unacceptable in an already under-served society. Most of the industrial disputes arise from issues that may be viewed as arcane,

59 Stopping Nonsense! such as nomenclature and use of call rooms. It could be argued that the Nigerian health system has failed Nigerians. The system is not nationally integrated. The policies are not comprehensively assessed before inauguration; are not regularly reviewed and are poorly implemented. The national health indices are among the worst in the Sub-Saharan Africa. Consequently, life expectancy is very low in Nigeria, compared to countries of comparable gross domestic product (GDP).

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RETHINKING THE NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE SCHEME.

June 2015

The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was formally launched in Nigeria in 2005, though the law mandating it was approved in 1999. Its aim was to facilitate universal healthcare in Nigeria, but unfortunately its design and implementation were fundamentally flawed. The Nigeria nation is woefully behind her national goal of universal healthcare by 2015. Several challenges can be seen as mitigating factors. These include: Access Equity Financing Infrastructure Governance ACCESS: Access to quality and equitable care is regarded as the bedrock of a functional, national health

61 Stopping Nonsense! system. The NHS in United Kingdom promises and delivers universal healthcare. Though funding gap is a continual challenge for the British government. The United States of America recently passed a law mandating some sort of universal care, through the ‘Obama care’ legislation.

In Nigeria, only five million citizens (an abysmal 3% of total population) have access to the NHIS mandated health service. Of this minuscule fraction of the population, significant portions (4 million persons) are employees of public or government institutions. About one million are from what is termed the organised private sector. Over 155 million Nigerians are not covered by NHIS, and therefore do not have access to the intended universal healthcare.

This is even more worrisome, considering that in 2005 when the scheme was fully launched, the government set a target of year 2015 for achieving universal healthcare. This failure in expanding and deepening coverage is the major index, it can be argued in the high mortality rate and low life expectancy (46 years) in Nigeria.

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Wall posters that announce deaths and burials’ arrangements the Nigerian way, usually bear the ominous phrase of death after ‘…. a brief illness’! A constant but ignored testimony to the general poor state of health of the average Nigerian. Most resort to self- care and quack consultations, in lieu of proper medical assessment, because they lack the cash to pay for affordable healthcare.

The problem of access is amplified at the bottom of the pyramid. Most, if not all Nigerians in informal or extra- legal sectors are uncovered by health insurance, likewise the unemployed and the aged. These are the most vulnerable groups in the society and most women are inexplicably found in these segments.

This brings us to the issue of equity in the National Health Insurance Scheme.

EQUITY: Universal health Insurance, which the NHIS is designed to achieve, is a social programme. Social programmes are generally expected to create a framework for equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. In other words, a level of social equity is an in- built expectation.

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In designing national health coverage schemes, many developed nations attempted to ensure equity by making health insurance mandatory, (UK made it free at the point of care); deny health insurance companies or health management organisations (HMOs) the right to reject clients or drop clients; etc. some nations like Japan even made the options offered by almost all the health insurance companies to be almost undifferentiated. All these are aimed to create an equal opportunity for all citizens to have similar healthcare quality. This is a measure of equity in the health system.

The NHIS lacks such well formulated equity index. The very rich can have extremely luxurious healthcare options (provided by HMOs working under NHIS), complete with air ambulance and liposuction. While those in the lower echelon of the coverage spectrum can only be covered for the basic health services, including very limited hospital stay, in the incident of debilitating illness.

The worst off are those in the bottom who do not even have access, and are thus condemned to dealing with roadside drug peddlers and traditional voodoo healers. This does not meet the expected equity index.

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FINANCING: The NHIS is currently financed from payroll. Employers pay 10% of their worker’s basic salary, while the employees contribute 5%, for a total of 15% of payroll surcharge. However, there are myriad plans for ‘topping up’, to enable the beneficiary to enjoy superior service.

Financing the NHIS from payroll appears to be a fundamental flaw in a country where official unemployment is about 25% (Over 50% in youths below the age of 32 years). Too many people are jobless and therefore cannot afford ANY health insurance cover. Beyond the 25% unemployment, most employments are in the informal and semi-formal sectors. These sectors usually do not have verifiable payroll and hence do not participate in the NHIS.

All these factors show that the scheme was flawed at its policy design stage. It did not take full cognizance of the social and economic situation of Nigeria. Any social or economic benefit that is linked to formal jobs in most developing economies will instantly discriminate against most of the citizens. This is because formal jobs are a rarity in developing economies, unlike in developed societies.

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How do you access the payroll of a commercial motorcycle rider, whose entire business is done on cash and carry and basis? Meanwhile he has a wife who needs ante-natal services and an aging mother who needs geriatric care. But they are all uninsured.

The payroll financing of the NHIS as it currently is, must be regarded as a limiting factor.

INFRASTRUCTURE: the healthcare infrastructure in Nigeria has significantly improved in the past 12 years, largely due to private investment. However, it is still grossly inadequate for a population of over 160 million people.

From hospital beds to Magnetic Resonance Imaging equipments; from desktop and handheld computers to surgical tables; from running portable water to steady electricity; all these and everything in between are in short supply.

It was expected that the pooling of funds from NHIS from payrolls would spur massive investment in the health care infrastructure. This has not happened. The massive funds directly budgeted for healthcare by the

66 Stopping Nonsense! government notwithstanding. Excruciating corruption and crass irresponsibility are the usual suspects. However poor planning and inadequate capacity development are also factors.

GOVERNANCE: Governance is weak in the NHIS. It is rare to hear a case of an aggrieved customer seeking and getting a satisfactory sanction against a participating health facility or HMO for unethical or illegal practice. It is appalling that conflict of interest is not raised when the same group of people that own HMOs equally operate hospitals or health service providers.

There are clear cut outcomes that participating health facilities are strictly expected to adhere to. Rather, there are general outlines and guidelines that are usually known only to a few people within the HMO and the health providers.

The NHIS, which was launched in 2005 in Nigeria, is a laudable initiative. It has helped millions of people to have access to better healthcare. But it can be argued that because of poor policy design, it has failed woefully to achieve as stated goal of universal healthcare by 2015.

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OSTRICH NATION!

December 2015

I wrote the ensuing piece a few months ago, to alert Nigerians to a latent and brewing danger. I remember that a good friend of mine lampooned me on Facebook, as talking rubbish. I don't think he still thinks I am talking rubbish after the Kaduna incident, last week. Ostrich Nation, Lazy intellectuals, Reactive leadership. SHITTE VS SUNNI TERRORISM

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1. HAMAS is a shitte terrorist group sponsored by Iran and controlling Gaza. 2. HITZBOLLAH is a shitte terrorist group sponsored by Iran and controlling Lebanon. 3. Alawites clan is a shitte clan controlling syria (Assad dynasty) and supported by Iran. Shittes are far more sophisticated in using political structures that have terrorist nucleus to control regions and countries. They organize control and win their regions city by city! They always have one spiritual head, even if there are several Ayotallahs. It is not unlikely that this 'protest' was sponsored by Iran. You can now understand why they will not protest killings and abductions of fellow citizen or attacks on Buhari and Sheik Bauchi few years back, but will protest Gaza conflict. Talk of where your bread is buttered.

What we should learn from this is that the very soul of Northern Nigeria, and indeed Nigeria, is up for grabs. The Sunni terrorists like Boko Haram, AL Qaeda etc. are basically 'hit and run' terrorists. They bomb and die. Or bomb and scamper. Hoping simply to destroy, devastate and lay desolate. Shittes,on the other hand, systematically work to gain control of all apparatus of power discreetly, city block by city block. Gain control

73 Stopping Nonsense! of hearts (through religion) and resources (through arms & brigandry). Then unleash a local fiefdom of fear. From which you can never regain those territories again, ever! Iran, Gaza and Lebanon are ever present examples. One irony though, they detest Sunni and Wahabist Muslims. Maybe they can be a bulwark against BH in Zaria and other places they are beginning to "control".

We don’t know what we are facing yet. Our problems are getting far deeper than PDP/APC or Ohanaeze/Arewa.

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RADICAL ISLAM AND THE GLOBALISATION OF TERROR!

November 2015

Today again, the world has joined France to mourn! The massacre was as horrendous as it was ferocious. It left all the people living in the most advanced cities of the world numb with trepidation. The scenes usually beheld on Karachi TV channels are now played out in 'rue De paris'. Terror is now firmly global. It's no longer an Arab thing, an African nightmare or an East Asia debacle. It has become recurrent in the world's most sophisticated capital. No hiding place.

A few hours before this horror was unleashed, I was discussing what I considered a political and security mistake by the western Europeans. I am not one to sacrifice at the altar of political correctness. I wondered how Europeans could allow "what the world would say" to becloud practical judgement. Swathes of Muslim

75 Stopping Nonsense! population, under the guise of escape from Syria, were crossing the Mediterranean in hundreds of thousands, to flood Europe. My logic was IF they were merely war refugees, why were they not going to very very close Jordan and Saudi Arabia? Rather than aiming for Germany, France and UK with Turkey as a mere transit point? Jordan and Saudi Arabia are both ARAB & MUSLIM nations. Saudi is swimming in oil riches, supposedly. What of UAE? It's closer than Germany. Why were the same Muslims that bemoan the injustice and conspiracy of the west against Muslims, leaving nearby Muslim and Arab countries, but risk all to enter Europe? Is there a matter of social hypocrisy?!

I was worried and predicted a rise in coordinated attacks in Europe. I am not a prophet. But I like to study trends. In 2009, in an article, I predicted the rise of "an army of hate" in Northern Nigeria. Today we are still battling Boko haram, with shifting deadlines. France has never faced this breadth of attack, with such audacity. It is no coincidence it is coming after the influx of Syria "refugees". The truth is that global terrorism and Islam are closely linked. Before the biles rise, let me elucidate.

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Majority of Muslims are moderate and peaceable. But the moderate Muslims have watched as the dangerous radical Islam rose. Radical Islam rose with the rise of petrodollar! As Saudi Arabia began to gain stupendous wealth, it started funding clerics and building mosques all across the globe. It was her way of spreading her branch of ISLAM, Wahabist Islam. Nigeria received a huge dose of these funding, in many form. Ultimately our government finally accepted to join OIC, with the attendant furore. It wasn't by accident.

Also the theocratic mileu ushered in by the sack of the Shah of Iran further emboldened the radical wing in Islam. Then came the mujahedeens of the Afghanistan- Soviet union battle of the 80s and 90s. With Saudi money, mosques, schools and freewheeling clerics were unleashed with little regulation. Iran provided a template of Theocracy and Afghanistan gave military training and bragging/ recruiting impetus.

Another important aspect is that Muslims world over feel they deserve better. They generally feel alienated, right or wrong. Several surveys have revealed this. But on a closer examination, it can be deduced that Islam is

77 Stopping Nonsense! actually exclusive! It is incredibly difficult to assimilate Muslims in any society. They are distinct.

Lee Kuan Yew said that "...Hinduism, Chinese Confucianism, Japanese Shintoism, are really secular. They know that to progress, you must master science and technology...... But the Muslims believe that if they master Koran and they are prepared to do all it prescribed, they will succeed". This is the opinion of the founding leader and late patriarch of Singapore. He may have generalised, but the core of the statement is incontrovertible.

I am one of those who believe that Islam needs her reformation. Christianity had descended into carnal evil in the middle ages, before the reformation epoch ushered in by Luther in Wittenberg. How long would we all watch this debasing of a sublime and peaceful religion, by radicalised renegades? Europe, in the quest to be politically correct, have sacrificed her law abiding citizens. Now we are asked to join in a wholly preventable mourning!!! Can the world win the war against terror militarily? The answer is unequivocal No!! To end this global nightmare, the world need to invoke

78 Stopping Nonsense! the strength and resolve of moderate Muslims. Moderate Muslims and their leaders are the ones best poised to stall the momentum of mass murder by Islamic terrorists. We saw the initial nonchalance of northern leaders in Nigeria, when Boko Haram was rising. Despite its violent tendencies, ab initio. But when the radical group began to threaten their effective leadership, and sacking some from their homes, they rallied. And now Boko Haram is receiving the fight of their life. Likewise in Mali, Chad and Cameroun. From these I am convinced that radical Islam will start dying when they start challenging the moderate Islamic political leaderships. But why wait till then?

The world needs to start engaging moderate Muslims and moderate Muslim leaders. They have to start identifying and isolating radical preachers in mosques and schools. They have to let moderate Muslims know that they may find it very difficult to enter any western and developed country, including Russia and China. Moderate Muslims need to know that radicalism is tarring all Muslims! In Nigeria, the rise of radical Islam is among the reasons why Biafra clamour is getting louder. Majority of the Muslims who are peace loving and restrained are the last best hope of a besieged world.

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But the Europeans need to ditch political correctness. Extraordinary times require extraordinary strategies! Peace symbols don't bring peace. Preparedness can. Ozoemena!

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SYLLABUS OF DECEIT! (THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST COUP)

July 2017

The broadcast on Biafra by Al-Jazeera must have hit home. I know this for sure with the rush by apologists of the Military-North Complex to indulge in their favourite revisionism. The first Nigeria coup is always their take-off point.

However, we Ndi Igbo will never stop telling our story. The first coup that they keep labelling the Igbo coup because some of its leaders were Igbo, was never an Igbo coup. If the Military-North Complex that ruled and ruined Nigeria is willing to defend their assertions, let the Federal government of Nigeria muster the will to set up a Commission that will interrogate the first and second coups, since they always claim ALL our problems started then. This may help to bring a final closure to the claims and counter claims!

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Indeed Major Kaduna Nzeogwu was reputed to have led the coup. The revisionists never fail to recollect how he invaded the home of Sir Ahmadu Bello and murdered him. They however always fail to mention that Nzeogwu didn't act alone. Nzeogwu shot his way into Sir Bello's home, with Lt Atom Kpela, a Tiv man, amongst others shooting with him.

Nzeogwu was murdered by northern troops at Nsukka sector, and his eyes plucked out before burial, during the war. What of Atom Kpela? He ended up as Military Governor of East Central state I.e Igbo land! And you will never hear members of the Military-North Complex mention Atom Kpela when they describe the horrors of that fateful night in Sir Ahmadu Bello's home. The Military-North Complex will always breeze through the fact that Lt Col Unegbe contributed most immensely in the failure of the coup in Lagos. Not only because he paid with his life, the ultimate sacrifice by an Igbo man against an "Igbo coup". His refusal to grant any access to the ammunition store, for which he was in charge, as the Quarter-Master General, singularly ruined the coup in Nigeria's capital then.

We acknowledge the horrors of that first coup. It is also

82 Stopping Nonsense! on record that the fatalities of that coup were 15 persons. A very sad outcome! However you will never hear the revisionists mention that the counter-coup had fatalities of 214 persons, mainly Igbo officers. About 17 times the fatalities of the first coup. A clear case of Crime against Humanity, under current UN charter! No other coup in Nigeria has ever had up to 20% of that level of fatality. Even the violent attempted Orkar coup.

The revisionists will never mention that the coup failed in the north because the coup failed woefully in Kano. The failure of the coup in Kano was because Lt.Col Ojukwu refused to mobilise the 5th battalion to join the coup.

Gen Olusegun Obasanjo in his book "NZEOGWU" wrote that a Lt Ude was sent by the coup plotters to kill Ojukwu. Luckily he was arrested. The Kano Airport which the coup plotters had hoped to secure was secured for Nigeria by Lt Ike Nwachukwu, whom Ojukwu detailed to do that duty. All these players that played pivotal and patriotic roles in debilitating the coup were Igbos. You will also hear them saying that M.I. Okpala, the Premier of Eastern Region was not murdered because

83 Stopping Nonsense! the Igbo coup executors in Enugu refused to touch him. However in the biography of Shehu Musa Yaradua, Yaradua narrated the events of that night.

Yaradua was a Lieutenant and he stated that he was practically in charge of the Enugu battalion that night. He narrated that his commanding officer, Lt.Col Fajuyi was in Lagos. The 2nd in command, who was Major Akonobi, was according to Yaradua 'floundering'. He, Yaradua, was the one that received the signal from the Brigade command in Lagos. And he REFUSED to obey it. He said he refused to obey because he wanted to hear from the Brigade Commander directly, but they could not put him on.

He also narrated that it was him that secured the Archbishop of Cyprus and his entourage, as well as the Premier of Eastern Region. Otherwise the Premier would have been murdered. So much for the conspiracy theories that Igbo officers & men refused to murder M.I. Okpala because they are same tribe. Or is distinguished Major Gen. Shehu Musa Yaradua, of blessed memory a liar?

Meanwhile the coup failed not only in Enugu, but also

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Kano and Benin. Of course Kano and Benin are Igbo land.

You will never hear members of the Military-North Complex that ruined Nigeria mention the IFEAJUNA MANUSCRIPT, which detailed their true plans and intentions. The document detailed clearly their intention to hand over power to Chief Obafaemi Awolowo. No less a person than Odia Ofeimun, Chief Awolowo's private secretary for a long time, and renowned poet revealed this. Obasanjo had also referred to this document, most likely in a Freudian slip. All other coups in Nigeria, led by different tribal elements, none bears a tribal moniker. Only the first coup. An institutional attempt to justify all the genocides and official discriminations against Ndi Igbo. All these continue to fuel the burning quest for Ndi Igbo to leave this vindictive union.

It's time Nigeria officially stops the revisionism. If the Military-North Complex think their version is the right one, let them have the courage to open an official truth inquest, into the events of that cold January night. Let us see if it can help us get an acceptable closure to that painful and fatal epoch.

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WHO WILL TELL THE PRESIDENT?

April 2016

President Buhari, as has become characteristic, issued another policy statement from abroad. To deal with Pipeline vandals as he is dealing with Boko Haram. An instructive warning. The vandals better heed this warning from a retired General, or. Or what?

This threat was issued as a policy statement in the inaugural speech of May 29 2015. Yet, we have descended into hell's neighbourhood.

Obasanjo, a former General, used all the wicked force he could muster against the Niger Delta militants. It failed woefully. A polite civilian and his humane deputy solved the problem of militancy and crass vandalism, with a civil solution. We had respite for almost 8 years. It will be necessary to remind everyone that Nigeria is

86 Stopping Nonsense! about 910000 square kilometers. This is the expanse of space that 300000 strong police force and 85000 strong Armed forces will secure. Secure from armed robbers, kidnappers, ritual killers, rapists, etc. Then add killer Herdsmen, Boko Haram and now resurgent militancy and vandalism!

It is also noteworthy that Nigeria has about 30 metropolitan cities and about 10000 towns and villages that need security. How does Buhari plan to fight war on two fronts, while securing all Nigerians? It is either he is misinformed or he is misleading us.

Those pipelines run through a lot of those villages. How do you police them, without active collaboration of the indigenes?!

The Nigeria security network, by size, can't even secure our cities. Talk less of hinterland pipe networks. A look at the crime pages of our dailies will confirm how crime still thrives in Nigeria. The police numbers and resources are inadequate to secure the cities. Talk less of pipelines.

Herdsmen every week massacre in scores. The army

87 Stopping Nonsense! and police can't stop them. And yet our president in far away China is declaring war on militant vandals. The truth is that force is not the panacea for Niger Delta crisis. The "clueless" one was able to use a stop-gap solution to contain this problem. Yet he was repeatedly maligned.

Rather than declare war that our government cannot win, it would have been better to send a new revenue bill to national Assembly. The bill should propose a new derivation formula that includes COMMUNITY RIGHTS.

A slice of the national revenue should be allocated directly to the oil and Pipeline communities. This is not for infrastructure, but should be directly credited to the individual community members, through their bank accounts. The accounts should be based on full identification. And payments for each community will be predicated on no interruption of production or pipeline flows. This gives most of the youths of host communities a stake in uninterrupted production and un-vandalised pipelines.

And if the payments are channelled straight through

88 Stopping Nonsense! individual accounts, it will bypass being hijacked by local politicians and goons.

This, or something similar, would have been a more permanent and creative solution. It is already costs us heavily in no fuel, no power, military lives, civilian lives and enormous equipment spending to fight militants. Force will not solve it because Nigeria's security network is still inadequate for a country of 187 million people, spread across 910000 square kilometers.

But pray, Who will tell the president? My name is Olisa Akukwe. And I still want to #StopNonsense.

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WHY BIAFRA WILL NOT GO AWAY (PART 1)

October 2015

On the evening of Saturday 22nd August 2015, the Punch Newspaper Online carried the news that Radio Biafra was back on air. It was announced that the station is transmitting on 104.7FM band, in south-east Nigeria. Punch described the station as a ‘pirate channel’ and they wondered how it could be transmitting after the Federal government claimed to have jammed its signal. What may be more worrying to the federal mandarins, the media, and the general public, outside the Igboland, is how the rogue station can have such traction and attraction in a supposedly modern Nigeria.

There is a reason or rather reasons why Radio Biafra, and more fundamentally, Biafra will not go away. To understand why, we have to go back.

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PRE-INDEPENDENCE: In the pre-independent Nigeria, the colonialist created 3 regions that were anchored by the majority ethnic groups of these regions (Yoruba-western region, Hausa-Fulani – northern region, and Igbo – eastern region) 1951: In the first election for ‘limited self – government’ in 1951, it was only in the eastern region, the Igbo heartland, that a minority became head of government. It was Mr Eyo Ita, an Ibibio who became the first head of government in Eastern region. This was in a region where Igbos are the overwhelming majority.

For perspective, in the west, the NCNC and its allied parties (eg, the Ibadan peoples party, Ondo improvement league, Otu Edo, etc) won a total of 51 seats, while the Action group won 29 seats. But on the floor of the parliament where the government would be formed, several members of the allied parties cross- carpeted to AG, raising the AG majority to 45 and NCNC led by Azikiwe was forced into opposition. This may have happened out of fear that the majority Yoruba would not lead the government in western region, if NCNC formed the government.

In the north, it was the Fulani prince – Ahmadu Bello,

91 Stopping Nonsense! who took the reins with implicit backing of Sir Sharwood Smith. So from the onset, unlike the twisted opinions of being paraded, Ndi Igbo were their brother’s keeper and had a liberalised attitude to governance based on merit rather than ethnicity.

To further buttress this fact, in 1952, a Fulani man, Mallam Umaru Altine was elected mayor in Enugu, the capital of Eastern region, the Igbo heartland. He was the first mayor of Enugu, and he held this position till 1958. Imagine an Igbo man being mayor of Kaduna in 2015, talk less of 1952. Ndi igbo believed in the Nigerian project more than any other group, before the advent of industrial-scale killing of Igbos.

1954: A hardly discussed part of Nigerian history is the 1954 election outcome. The NCNC won the majority in Western and Eastern regions, which implies they won the south. By the constitutional provisions of the election, the NCNC was to nominate 6 out of the 9 federal ministers. (Each region was to provide 3 federal ministers, from the winning party).This led the NPC, AG, and the British Colonial government to plot and collude, with a view to prevent the NCNC and NEPU alliance from forming the government at the Center.

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According to Yusuf Bala Usman, the acclaimed northern Nigeria historian, a secret correspondence to the Colonial Office No. 26, dated 28th November 1954, outlined the plans and measures used to force NCNC to ‘surrender’ its rightful claim to leading the government, and facilitated the emergence of Abubakar Tafawa Belewa as the Prime Minister.

Equally swept under the proverbial carpet, is the fact that in the 1959 election, which ushered in the independent government, the NCNC won the majority of the votes cast! NCNC got 2,592,629 votes while the NPC got 2,027,194 and AG received 1,980,839 votes. The system had already been rigged by the British Colonialists, with fervent spurring by Sir Sharwood Smith, the Governor of Northern region. The system was designed to give NPC the most seats, to prevent the progressive and ‘radical’ eastern region from gaining power at the Center.

These are some of the well concealed facts of pre- independence politics. 1ST COUP: Nigeria had her first military coup on January 15, 1966. It was led by five Majors, of whom the most popular is Major Nzeogwu. The coup has been

93 Stopping Nonsense! maliciously labelled the “Igbo coup”. This was because most of the leaders of that coup came from Eastern region. However, of the 5 Majors, one was Yoruba, and one from Mid-west. In other words, almost half of the coup leaders did not come from Igbo heartland.

The fact that the coup was foiled mainly by Igbo officers is also largely and intentionally obscured. In Lagos, Lt Col. Unegbu, who was then the quarter master general of the Nigerian army and in charge of the ammunition store at Ikeja barracks, was shot dead. His crime was refusing to hand over or provide access to the ammunition. This singular heroic act fundamentally wrecked the coup plan in Lagos, as the plotters could not muster the hardware to complete the take-over in Lagos. Yet it was an ‘Igbo coup’. Obasanjo, in his book ‘Nzeogwu’, wrote that one Lieutenant Ude was sent to kill Ojukwu in Kano, for not supporting the coup. But his plan was thwarted. Indeed, it was Ojukwu’s refusal to join the coup and his securing of Kano using the 5th battalion that scuttled the coup in Northern region. Yet it is an ‘Igbo coup’.

Another little discussed perspective on the first and second (revenge) coups is the casualty figures. The total

94 Stopping Nonsense! casualty of the first coup or ‘Igbo coup’, was 15 people. But in the revenge coup organised by the Northern officers, a total of 214 persons were killed! In other words, it was a cold-blooded retributive massacre. It is also often mentioned that the January 1966 coup succeeded in Kaduna completely, partially in Lagos and failed completely in Enugu, because it was an ‘igbo coup’. But nobody remembers that it also failed completely in Kano and Benin despite plans to strike in these cosmopolitan cities.

The other important fact that the northern and military establishment concealed was the intention of the Jan ’66 coup plotters. It was their intention to release Chief Obafemi Awolowo from prison and install him as prime minister. So much for the igbo coup theorem. This intention has been revealed by several high profile stake holders in the Nigeria project, intentionally or unintentionally.

Odia Ofeimun, Awolowo’s private secretary of several years and acclaimed poet, wrote on the 21 oct 2012 in a Sahara Reporters article that the Jan ’66 coup plotters planned to hand over political power to Awolowo. This was according to the IFEAJUNA MANUSCRIPT which

95 Stopping Nonsense! the federal government have contrived to keep secret. Likewise a former Federal Commisioner for Youths and Sports under Gowon, Maj. Gen Olufemi Olutoye stated same in his biography of Awolowo.

It is obvious that ndi igbo were intentionally maligned, using the first coup as a faux reason. Mr F. Fani-Kayode pushed this calumnious misinformation to a hysterical decibel in recent memory. Unfortunately, Ndi igbo remembers. And these serial and horrific injustices make Biafra a romantic nirvana to the typical igbo person, wherever she may be.

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WHY BIAFRA WILL NOT GO AWAY (PART 2)

October 2015

Major General Aguiyi Ironsi was gruesomely murdered as the head of state in July 1966. His murder was singularly significant for its unprecedented cruelty. It was like the first incarnation of ISIS. The ‘official’ reason attributed to the bloody coup that took his life (the revenge coup) was that he wanted to institute Igbo dominance by making Nigeria a ‘unitary system’. I have tried to find out the exact actions he took that signified his ‘unitary system’ intentions. Indeed I found them.

On 24th May 1966, he promulgated two fateful Decrees: Decrees 33 and 34 of 1966. Decree 33 was known as the public order Decree and it proscribed political parties, as well as tribal and cultural leaning organisations. But it was the Decree 34 which abolished the regions,

97 Stopping Nonsense! regional governments and civil services and re- introduced the provinces and military administrators for the groups of provinces, that was interpreted rightly as the creation of ‘unitary state’. After this, by 29th and 30th May, all hell was let loose with industrial scale murder of Ndi-igbo in Northern Nigeria.

The rest, as they say, is history. Let us examine the northern government that took over from Aguiyi Ironsi for a moment. Did they reverse the ‘unitary state’? Were we returned to the regional government? Were the federal civil service and judiciary abolished? Were we returned to regional civil service? The answer to all these is a sadly perplexing ‘NO!’

If Aguiyi Ironsi and over 200 mainly Igbo officers were killed for the ‘unitary state’ crime, how come Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Mohammed, and T.Y Danjuma – the coup leaders, did not revert to the regional system? Rather what happened was that the new northern leaders now took the ‘offensive’ policy and made Nigeria a truly unitary state, after Ironsi was murdered for this 'crime’.

The federal civil service, federal judiciary, federal police

98 Stopping Nonsense! force, etc are very much the reality of Nigeria today. The provinces that Ironsi wanted to re-introduce are now known as states. The long and short of this drama is that Aguiyi Ironsi, Fajuyi, and hundreds of other people killed in the revenge coup were just sacrificed to introduce a northern-led government. It was not based on any ‘fear’ either of a unitary state or of Igbo dominance. It was intended to restore the north to power!

Subsequent policies reinforced this perception. The most essential tool of this new hegemony was the revenue matrix.

Before the government of Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria has had five revenue and fiscal commissions. Starting from Sir Sydney Phillipson commission of 1946; to K.J Binns commission of 1964. All the 5 commissions made derivation principle the prime determinant of revenue to each region. Everyone knows that the legendary Main Market Onitsha was built from funds generated by palm oil. Chief M.I Okpara commissioned the construction firm Messr Brioni and Co, with full funding, to design and build the market in its modern form. It was already the largest market in west Africa,

99 Stopping Nonsense! before Murtala Mohammed shelled it during the civil war.

In July 1968, just two years into his government and with a civil war raging, Yakubu Gowon constituted committee of 8 known as Dina Committee (Dina was the Chairman) to look at issues of revenue sharing among the newly created 12 states. It is on record that the Dina Committee was the first revenue and fiscal commission that relegated ‘derivation principle’ to the bottom of the revenue sharing mix. Unsurprisingly, Obafemi Awolowo (who was then the Federal Finance commissioner) and the entire 12 states finance commissioner rejected the Dina committee recommendation. Mysteriously, Gowon implemented the Dina committee report. This was a determined step to fully implement the unitary state agenda, for which they had killed Aguiyi Ironsi.

The first step to accrete revenue to the northern-led federal government was Decree 13 of 1970. The decree introduced the following changes: 100% export duties to states of origin was reduced to 60%. 40% went to the Federal government. 100% duty on fuel consumption that went to the state of

100 Stopping Nonsense! consumption was reduced to 50%. 50% went to the Federal government. 50% mining rents and royalties to state of activity was reduced to 45%. 55% went to distributable pool and federal government. All excise duties now went to federal government and distributable pool. The distributable pool sharing formula was made 50% equality of states and 50% population.

Remember that the last census before the civil war was massively rigged to favour the North and it was subsequently rejected by Zik and Awo. But under military rule, Decree was total.

This Decree 13 of 1970 was the provenance of all economic injustice the Biafra ‘region’ (south-east and south-south) has suffered and still suffers. In 1971, though Decree No. 9, all the rents and royalties of offshore oil were transferred from the states to the federal government. The unitary government initiative was almost total. It was finally culminated through Decree Nos. 6 and 7 of 1975. Through these Decrees, the North-led federal government took:

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The remaining 45% of mining rents and royalties previously left for the states. All import duties, while transferring half to the distributable pool Likewise personal income tax

The takeover was now total. The minority ethnic groups (south-south) have paid the most price for these appropriation of resources by North-led federal government. Ndi-igbo lost the most because merit was forever shackled in the dungeon of state mendacity. Effort, endowment and enterprise were no longer directly proportional to reward.

Today, Lagos state pays as heavy a price as the ‘Biafran nation’ that they helped to subdue. I read in the news few days back, that the former head of the Lagos State Board of Internal revenue, William Fowler, has been appointed chairman of FIRS. He was said to have expanded Lagos IGR from N3.6 billion to N20.5 billion in a month. Great. The implication is that he is appointed to do same or similar feat for the federal government. I am worried because, it is a plan to continue the milking and exploitation of Southern Nigeria, in this union. It is no secret that over 80% of current federal government revenue came from the

102 Stopping Nonsense! former Biafran region. Almost all federal government revenue comes from the south. Now Fowler is tapped, to further milk resources from the long suffering southerners, in other to keep Nigeria ‘one’.

I implore all citizens of former Biafra to speak up with a common voice and demand monthly publication of the state by state contribution to the federation account. For purposes of clarification, the federation account consists of: Company income tax Import duties Export duties Excise duties Petroleum profit tax NNPC earning from direct sales Pipeline license and other fees Surplus arising from sale of gas VAT

As Fowler is coming to further increase revenue, he must be ready to be totally transparent. State contributions to the federation account must be published monthly. The greatest calamity to have befallen the former Biafra

103 Stopping Nonsense! and the most compelling reason for the persisting Biafran dream is economics. The former Biafran nation is now made up of 9 states. It is however postulated that the current Delta state would have joined a free Biafran nation, if the dream had succeeded. Taking these 10 states together, you can account for almost all the oil and gas resources in Nigeria.

From 1970- 2014, Nigeria has reaped about 30 billion barrels of oil, from the region that ‘Was A Country’. From available data, Nigeria oil production has varied between 1.241 million barrels per day to 2.627 million barrels per day, from 1980 till date. The 70s show similar trend. Oil price has also varied between 10USD to 140USD, in changing dollar value. Taking a conservative 40 dollars value as a benchmark, the Biafran region has ‘lost’ about 1.2 trillion dollars from oil revenue alone, on the minimum.

Add that potential investable funds, to a population that has an incredibly high talent-to-GDP ratio, with an enterprising culture and republican leadership, and you will get the first and only African tiger economy. The infrastrutural investment in Biafra would have surpassed that of Holland and Belgium.

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The entrepreneurial and innovative capacity of Ndi- Igbo is not in doubt. The confidence of the Niger-Delta nationalities is also indomitable. The technological exploits of Sam Orji and C.D.C Akpudo, amongst many others were legendary during the civil war. If it was not for the policy of benign neglect practiced by past military and civilian governments in Nigeria, the Igbo heartland would have been the driving force of African renaissance.

To put it in current perspective, removing the oil revenue from former Biafra, the Naira today would have been trading at about N550 –N600 to the dollar, except there is a Currency Board in Nigeria. On the contrary, if Biafra had survived and been an independent country, her foreign reserve will be above that of Singapore and her currency can only be kept low by running huge current account surplus; for the purposes of having inevitably export-led economy.

It would not be difficult to visualize that Biafra would have had world-class infrastructure that would spur investment and incredibly high productivity for a historically hardworking and meritorious society. The reason Ndi-Igbo flock to Lagos, Abuja, is because of

105 Stopping Nonsense! relatively better infrastructure built by the federal government in those cities. Similar infrastructural investment was never made in the Igbo heartland. In the era before the first coup and subsequent revenge coup, Ndi-Igbo controlled heights of Nigerian economy. An Igbo man, Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, was reputed the richest man in West Africa. He was the chairman or director of Nigeria’s most profitable firms then (including Shell, Guinness, etc}.

He was the founding and first president of the Nigeria Stock Exchange. Indeed he was knighted by the Queen of England for his legendary business acumen.

It was a testament to the economic resilience of Ndi- Igbo, from defunct Biafra, that after the civil war physical and financial devastation, they toiled back to the economic heights of Nigeria. Despite the known policy benign neglect of Igbo land. Igbo land got an international airport, 43 years after the civil war. This was decades after Lagos, Kano and Port Harcourt had international airports. Despite the fact that Ndi-Igbo are arguably the nucleus of international trade in Nigeria.

An appraisal of the list of Nigeria’s richest, published by

106 Stopping Nonsense! the reputable Forbes Africa, is revealing. Of the 10 richest, 4 are from the north, 3 from the south-west, two from the Niger-Delta and one is from the Igbo heartland. It is instructive that all the 4 from the north made their wealth from natural resources. We know that natural resources in Nigeria have been appropriated by Federal government. It is only through crony capitalism that you can become rich from ‘natural resources’ in Nigeria. The list showed that: Aliko Dangote made his wealth from cement, sugar, flour T.Y Danjuma – from Oil Abdulsamad Rabiu – from cement, sugar, flour Mohammed Indimi – from Oil These four are from the north. The three named from south-west made their wealth through natural resources also: Mike Adenuga – Oil, Telecom Folorunsho Alakija – Oil Femi Otedola - Oil It is only the three from Niger-Delta and Igbo land that are not listed as making their money from natural resources. They are: Tony Elumelu – Investments

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Orji Uzo Kalu – Investments Jim Ovia – Banking Note that these classifications were made by Forbes, not me.

However, it is interesting to note that all the people listed as having Oil as the main source of their monumental wealth, none comes from the region that produces oil. This top ten richest Nigerians’ list is food for deep thought.

The idea of Biafra remains attractive, because the ‘Biafran’ people know too well the heavy price they pay for the Nigerian union, with little or no reciprocation. They know that indeed “There was a country”. They dream of what it could have been. They yearn for true, objective merit. They pine for opportunity. They yearn for justice. And they wait and wait and wait and wait for Nigeria to embrace merit, opportunity and justice. While waiting, they remember Biafra with understandable nostalgia.

Until Nigeria realizes her prodigal nature and comes ‘home’ to the truth of restructuring, Biafra will not go away!

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FACTS DON'T LIE (REIGN OF ERROR)

January 2016

In 2006, a song that was part salsa, part hip-hop hit the airwaves with resounding resonance, globally. "Hips don't lie" by Shakira, the Colombian singer went on to sell 16 million copies over the last 10 years. I borrowed the title of this week's epistle from Shakira's song. Facts, like Hips, are evidence based. They don't lie.

Nigeria has been for far too long a society where opinion trumps facts; quota trumps merit; nepotism trumps justice and many times tribes trump truth. This has to change. It is important for Nigerians to deepen their understanding of economics because it affects us all. Nigerian youths need to ask more penetrating questions in the run-up to the next elections. Indeed they need to start asking those questions today. That is

109 Stopping Nonsense! the only change we can achieve.

ON THE ECONOMY: Babatunde Fashola, a super- minister in the APC government and a former, rather competent, governor of Lagos state told pension experts on 22nd Jan 2016, that this government is working to diversify the economy. They clapped. He blamed lack of diversification as the main cause of current malaise. The facts do not support Fashola's assertion.

The data collected by National Bureau of Statistics show that Nigeria's economy is already diversified. The almighty oil contributes barely 10% of our GDP. In fact the often maligned Trade contributes more than oil to our GDP.

Let's examine them. At the end of 2014, the year of the so-called peak oil price, crude oil and natural gas contributed about 9.616 trillion Naira to the GDP, 10.67% of the total. Meanwhile at the same period, Agriculture contributed 15.812_trillion Naira (17.5% of GDP) and Trade contributed 15.704 trillion Naira (17.42% of the GDP). The Telecom sector's contribution at 7.424 trillion Naira (8.23%) was very close to the oil contribution. So the constant assertion that the economy

110 Stopping Nonsense! is undiversified is hogwash. We may simply be talking of deepening the private sector or expanding the diversification.

One of the greatest mistakes repeated by successive governments in Nigeria is not understanding the greatest asset within any government agency. They think its money. It’s not. The greatest government asset is data. From births to deaths, and every other thing in between. Data is the core asset of government agencies and parastatals. If only they knew. It is a general belief that the last PDP government ruined Nigeria via corruption. In fact, the last PDP government may have wrecked our public finance because of corruption, but they left the economy vastly better than they met it.

The PDP governments from 1999-2014, have been the only government(s) in Nigeria to consistently increase per-capita income. Data that goes back to 1960 show that our per-capita income in 1960 was 1000 dollars. In 1999 (after 39 years), it was 1200 dollars. In other words it increased by 10 dollars per annum! From 1999 to 2014, PDP governments tripled per capita income to about 3500_dollars. That is about 143 dollars

111 Stopping Nonsense! per annum. Even if we exclude changes from GDP rebasing, it comes to about 2500_dollars by 2013 (before GDP rebasing). Data!

This brings me to an important differentiation. There is a huge difference between public sector and the economy as a whole. Even though public sector is part of the overall economy and affects it; in Nigeria public sector is less than 8% of GDP. What the NBS data is telling us is that even though past PDP governments enshrined public sector corruption, and the GEJ government may have wrecked public finance, they grew the economy more than ANY government in the history of Nigeria. Facts don't lie!

The fixation of Buhari and APC on chasing Dasuki et al, while shutting down the economy, is fundamentally flawed. The public sector contribution to GDP was 7.36% at the beginning of 2015. It makes no sense to stifle the rest 92% of the economy just to put public finance in order. If the emerging trends are anything to go by, the public finance may even be in worse tatters by end of 2017. If the government had deployed technology to prevent corruption, and astute diplomacy to recoup some stolen wealth; while keeping the economy open

112 Stopping Nonsense! without capital and import controls, Nigerians would have already been reaping the democracy dividends promised them.

The much ridiculed GEJ had incredibly successful Agriculture policies. The billionaire middle men in fertilizer distribution, were put out of business by simple but smart deployment of technology by the smooth-talking past Agriculture minister. Our national food import bill dropped from 6.3 billion dollars to 4.3_billion dollars, between 2009 and 2013.

It is also good to remember that the high oil price under the last government also necessitated high subsidy payment. About 10 billion dollars was spent on subsidy. Some people believe about a fifth of that was lost to corruption.

Now that oil price have come down by 2/3, the current government does not spend any money on subsidy. Or rather should not. The landing cost of a litre of PMS today 30 Jan 2016 is N67.69k. The pump price is N86.50k. In fact the cost of landing is increased by N5 due to storage, NPA and Jetty depot levies etc. Otherwise it would have been N62.71k. The extra N5

113 Stopping Nonsense! between freight+cost and landing price is essentially monopoly cost.

From Landing to dispensing at the filling stations, in this current no-subsidy regime, N19 is added to the cost per litre. This is a 22% added to the cost of gasoline between landing and retail sale. About 40 million barrels of PMS is consumed daily. About 10,000 trucks, owned by about 30 individuals control the transportation of PMS, less those moving through pipelines. A N3.05 margin is assured on each litre of PMS moved by this transporters. Plus N4 per litre bridging fund. That can easily come to about N280 million Naira margin daily, for truck owners.

The downstream petroleum sector needs comprehensive liberalization. From storage, to transportations, jetties, filling station operating requirements etc. Currently it is oligopolic. Bridging funds need to be abolished. We can't both eliminate subsidy and have subsidy at the same time. PMS should not sell the same price in Warri and in Tangaza. Beef does not sell same price in Dutse and Enugu. The petroleum ministers should take note. Adding 22% between landing cost in Apapa and

114 Stopping Nonsense! dispensing at Ajah or Gwagada is pure baloney! Lagos citizens and residents bear the cost of tankers blocking road, damaging the road, causing accidents and razing houses/shops etc. Yet they are made to buy the gasoline same price as folks in Damaturu. Some of these were reforms the past PDP governments failed to tackle. Either due to vested interest or hysterical opposition.

IMPORTS: Contrary to accepted wisdom, Nigeria is not over-dependent on imports. Services constitute more than half of our GDP. We need imports, like any other country. Our imports consume about 12.45% of our GDP, one of the lowest in the world!

World Bank Data shows that import as GDP % in Australia is 21.4%; in Canada 32.5%; in Benin republic 45.1%; in Botswana 43.3%; in China 18.9%; in Ghana 48.9% and UK 30.3%. Just to mention a few countries. Nigeria has one of the least import to GDP ratio of all countries. Data!

Everybody repeats the mantra of import dependence, including CBN and Presidency, without checking and comparing. No country survives for long without

115 Stopping Nonsense! imports. Our imports-to- GDP ratio is less than China's import-to-GDP ratio.

As a matter of fact, imports have helped us moderate inflation over the past 16 years. Without the benefits of disinflationary trends in China, US, India etc our headline inflation would have been much higher. How could Nollywood have boomed without the ever falling prices of VCD & DVD players, as well as CD burning machines? How could the music industry generate hundreds of billions of Naira without the massive penetration of cheap music stereo and personal listening devices? Without cheap Chinese feature and smartphones, how would the surging mobile Internet thrive and make fabulous money for the likes of Linda Ikeji, Bella Naija etc? But CBN felt that a policy of import control targeted at small, hapless, traders is proper.

Let's look at the import issue from another perspective. How come the falling commodity prices is not bringing down prices in our local markets? Price of gasoline has fallen 24.18% globally and only 1% in Nigeria. Rice fell about 13% globally, but is up 30% in Nigeria. Beef fell by 27.98% globally, but it is going up in local markets here. The government is always screaming about the fall in oil

116 Stopping Nonsense! price. Why is fall in commodity price not affecting domestic markets, but fall in oil price is?

The real reason our domestic commodity prices are very high is government policies. Primarily tariff regime. If some of these imports were not clamped down or tariff set very high, we will be able to 'import' the fallen global prices, despite the drop in oil prices, helping to moderate inflation. I am sure that domestic rice producers can produce rice at global competitive prices, if they have access to single digit financing, scale production, motorable access roads, no custom or police extortion on the road, predictable transport price etc. These are all within government responsibility. But the elites rather prefer using tariff to transfer burden to the common man, rather than cut into their potential embezzlement funds.

Mrs Iweala increased domestic rice price by over 50% in her first tenure under Obasanjo, after she embarked on tariff-mandated import-substitution of rice. Likewise Aliko Dangote had a 60% profit margin in his cement venture, under Obasanjo, due to government high cement import tariff. We bore the cost of his becoming a multi-billionaire, with high cement price in those years.

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Instead of using high tariff to keep out foreign products, government needs to apply transparent, targeted subsidies, especially in the Agric sector. We are tired of bearing the cost of creating state-sanctioned billionaires.

CAPITAL CONTROL: The current government adopted a policy of capital control, as soon as it came into office. It had the effect of effectively drying up foreign and domestic investment. It drove portfolio investors to flee from the stock market, with consequent loss of near 2 trillion value. It distorted market signal.

After the damage has been done, and the Naira had collapsed in the real market, CBN retreated partially. Revenue from Oil may have fallen to about 35 billion dollars, from about 88 billon dollars peak. But if the domestic asset prices have adjusted in real time, foreign and domestic investors would have eagerly bought assets in Nigeria through FDI or portfolio investment. The naira slide would have steadied at a much higher value than now. The markets were factoring in a price of 220-230 to the dollar, as the maximum slide before capital control was imposed. The capital control sent the worst kind of message.

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The dollar in dorm accounts were reported to be about 30% of bank assets in 2014. Under Sanusi, dollar accounts were treated as quasi-saving. Nigerian banks exposure to the oil industry in foreign currency is estimated at about 11 billion dollars. Some of those loans are non-performing or in NPL territory. Capital control alarmed the foreign lenders, with further downgrading of our credit rating.

Even as our export prices lost over half its value, foreign transfers from Nigerians in diaspora was on track to surpass the 21 billion dollars reported in 2013. But capital control effectively skewed this trend. UN estimates that 1.2 million Nigerians live in developed economies. With proper economic policies and legal frame work, transfers from Nigeria emigrants can surpass 50 billion dollars; more than what was lost in declining oil price.

Unlike oil money though, those folks won't allow monies earned in the hardest of circumstances to be siphoned by greedy politicians. This may explain part of the reason the government keeps bemoaning the shrinking oil revenue, instead of opening the economy, removing government from the commanding heights of

119 Stopping Nonsense! the economy and being transparent.

I simply took time to puncture some reign of error subsisting as conventional wisdom. In the coming days, I will pen a much shorter piece on government revenue.

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REIGN OF ERROR: THE PUBLIC SECTOR

March 2016

In the last article, (Facts Dont Lie: Reign of Error) I made a data driven case that Nigeria’s economy is already diversified; among other issues.

This following part shows that government revenue is sadly undiversified and the public sector is in shambles. The constant moaning by the federal government about the decline in revenue is a harsh and common reality. It is a product of a long term (structural) and short term (cyclical) impact on our public sector.

The federal government derived, at least till the end of 2014, 70% of her revenue from oil and its related products. From 1970, the Nigeria government had been an exploitative (pun intended) government, directly involved in exploring and exploiting natural resources

121 Stopping Nonsense! in the country. The military government of those years passed multiple laws (Decree 13 of 1970, Decree 9 of 1971, Decree 6 and 7 of 1975) that accreted all the oil resources to the center, to serve certain hegemonic interest. Unfortunately the foundations of our perennial public sector debacle were laid then, by men who are still very much around.

OIL GOVERNMENT: Every Nigerian government treats oil as inexhaustible and an ever dispensing ATM. The current president, for all his talk about diversifying federal government revenue sources, still firmly implanted himself as the ultimate oil czar. This fixation on oil is a symptom of unimaginative leadership. Almost every Nigerian administration has wasted our oil resources.

If Nigerians were more economically savvy, they would have wondered why in the past 10 years of relatively stable oil price, the federal government ran budget deficits in all but 3 years (2008, 2013 and 2014). Countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Angola, etc ran high budget surplus (between 5.4% of GDP to 28% of GDP) around same period. The budget surpluses of

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2013 and 2014 in Nigeria were meager 1.1% of GDP and 0.1% of GDP respectively. Nigeria governments ran budget deficits, despite high oil prices and scant spending on the Nigerian people. The federal government expenditure in Nigeria was just 5% of GDP, yet they could not muster reasonable budget surplus in a regime of high oil price. Only profligacy and corruption can explain this.

To give perspective, the countries I previously mentioned, with huge budget surplus in same period (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Angola etc) spent between 19.7% of GDP to 45.5% of GDP on their people. And still ran huge budget surpluses. They spent significantly higher share of their GDP on their people and still had significant budget surplus. Nigeria government spent significantly little on her people and still ran deficit budgets, in an era of high oil price. Think about that.

But that is not the biggest problem with our oil government. The biggest issue is the way we all treat the oil revenue. Oil and Gas in the ground is wealth. When you sell the oil and gas, you gain income. What now matters is what you spend the income on. If it is invested, it creates wealth that can replace the already

123 Stopping Nonsense! lost wealth from the ground. If you share it, as the Nigerian constitution stipulates, you end up consuming the income on recurrent (i.e. recurring) expenses.

We have been treating oil wealth like a replenishing resource. We should have been treating it like a depleting resource. Extracting oil and selling it for current consumption, as Nigeria does, is like a man selling one of his father’s houses every year to finance his consumption. One day, he will run out of houses and will have to rent, or worse, squat.

We should have been putting 70% of oil revenue into a statutory fund. The fund can only finance free education, free health care, unemployment insurance and pension for the poor. In other words, oil funds should have been dedicated to investing in the development of the human capital that could really grow our economy beyond oil. Rather what Nigeria has done is to deplete her wealth and spend it on salaries and inflated contracts.

Also as a country that derived almost all its forex and most of its government revenue from oil, we never critically studied the global oil market. Nigeria was

124 Stopping Nonsense! among the 12 member OPEC cartel that believed that if oil price is dropping, you cut production marginally, make lots of noise about it and wait for price to shoot up. In economics, this approach is considered supply side. Nigeria and most OPEC oil ministers only consider the supply (production) in their oil equation. This is understandable because it has worked in the past. But every critical economist looks at supply and demand. In the oil market, the only OPEC minister that seriously considered demand was Ali al-Naim, the 80 year old Saudi oil minister. He alone critically pointed out to the other OPEC members that the global oil intensity, which is a measure of oil demand was in sharp decline.

The global oil intensity measures the quantity of oil per day needed to produce a trillion dollar economy. In 1990, it took about 2.7 million barrels per day to produce a trillion dollars of GDP. By 2015, it took only 0.93 million barrels of oil per day to produce a trillion dollar GDP.

This is because as oil price kept going higher, the western world had the incentive to keep investing in more efficient processes and alternative energy sources.

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The higher the oil price, the bigger the investment (and returns) in alternative and efficient energies. When you combine this drop off in oil intensity and the new shale production in the US, you can see why the world is in oil glut now. Add Iran that is opening up its entire taps to make up for lost time.

The Saudi minister has consistently refused to cut production because he reasons that the three digit oil price of the recent years allowed shale production to be profitable (he is correct) and encouraged the western world to invest in alternative energies (he is correct here also).

At the current 40 USD price, shale production is unprofitable. This is already impacting Oklahoma, the shale capital of United States.

Likewise companies that were already gaining market share from internal combustion industry are seeing their shares collapsing. A case in point is Tesla. In practical terms, the Saudi oil minister has helped Nigeria and other OPEC countries to prolong the oil age by allowing oil price to come down and put some of these high cost alternatives in peril.

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Nigerian government lacked the vision and understanding to appraise the 2 trillion dollars global oil industry. We should thank the Saudi for the low oil price, as it would allow us another 2 decades of generating revenue from oil. This is the time to bring fundamental reforms to the oil sector. We have to stop using oil to fund salaries and sundry spending. We also have to directly compensate the oil communities with resource control (at least 30%).

CIVIL SERVICE: Nigeria civil service is bloated, aging and inefficient. The federal, state and local government staff strength is about 3.2 million. About 1.2 million people were in the federal civil service, while about 1.0 million people are employed in the state civil service. Local government employs about 800,000 workers. To this, you can add about 18000 political office holders and 20000 staff in FCT. A study by the public service reform team headed by Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State, discovered that the average age of civil servants was 42 years and that only 12% hold university degrees. This is not surprising, considering that federal character and

127 Stopping Nonsense! quota are the primary criteria of recruitment into the civil service. It is a measure of the pedestrian views of the former military leaders in Nigeria, that they saw the civil service as a tool for affirmative action, rather than as the agency for delivering governance.

By using the civil service to do affirmative action, they ingrained the culture of nepotism and killed professionalism, and it is not about to change anytime soon. Is it not instructive that all civil service reforms attempted since the 70s have failed? It is only when we jettison federal character and dedicate to building a truly professional civil service that we can expect reforms to yield result. The civil service needs to be leaner, more professional and more efficient. They also need to be paid much better after abolishing federal character and doing critical right sizing.

TAX REVENUE: Nigeria’s tax base as a percentage of GDP is the smallest of all countries published by World Bank. Our net tax is about 1.093 trillion naira, according to NBS. This stands at 1.21% of GDP. This is corroborated by the World Bank figures. There is no doubt that

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Nigerians pay little or no tax. The Nigerian government already takes huge funds directly from oil, which is an indirect tax on Nigerians. However, in the matter of declared taxes, Nigeria is the lowest in the entire world. The APC government obviously wants to seize on this to tax us with glee. I accept that we have to pay taxes. But it’s not with the current fiscal regime. IF Nigeria government wants to add huge direct tax revenues to their already huge indirect tax revenues (oil), the government will have to hands off oil. The oil revenue accruing to government must be earmarked statutorily for education, healthcare, poor people’s pension and unemployment insurance. It should be off limit to politicians. They can only legislate the criteria for access. It’s only after these changes that it may be fair to deepen and broaden the tax bracket. The government will also need to right size, as taxpaying Nigerians won’t accept a bloated civil service feeding fat on tax revenue.

Equally a new revenue sharing formula, with clear and greater emphasis on derivation must accompany the expansion of the tax bracket. Nigerians will generally not accept unbridled revenue transfers. For example,

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Ogun tax payers will resent having to pay for Borno hajj expense, via government funding of pilgrimage. If changes in revenue sharing formula do not accompany diversification of government revenue structure, expect social and political crisis in the future.

The government must also learn to support small and medium enterprises, if they hope to grow the tax base. These companies pay more tax, on aggregate, than the big companies. They also create more potentially taxable jobs. The current epoch of bureaucratic high handedness and banking contempt is not conducive for business. The government has to remove red tapes and lay out red carpets for SMEs. That is the only way businesses can thrive and pay taxes.

Small businesses will need small business insurance, underwritten by a quasi-government fund. This will stimulate banks to lend to them, since the risk is reasonably mitigated.

The Finance Ministry and CBN will do well to midwife an active factoring market in Nigeria, to ease the liquidity burden of SMEs. The culture of disdain for business operators, while hoping to force taxes out of

130 Stopping Nonsense! them, is at best self-defeating. SMEs are the major job creators in all societies. Government should improve the ease of doing business in Nigeria.

In all, token essentialism as we have always done in Nigeria will not solve our current challenges. We have to start the structural redesign that can save our children’s future, today. The public sector is the principal theater of that work.

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WOUNDED HOPE: ELECTIONS IN NIGERIA

October 2016

Edo election has just been concluded, with the usual recriminations and counter recriminations. The opposition party that lost the election, characteristically refused to accept the result. And for good reasons!

Many of the election observers also reported unfair and opaque practices. Edo citizens are still very much divided. But none of these are surprising. Critical national observers know that no national and sub-national election in Nigeria has been free of rigging, manipulation and compromise. It has only been of differences in degrees.

Whether it was the Shagari and Awolowo of the second republic, or Zik and Balewa of first. Abiola and Tofa of third republic or even Tinubu and Funsho Williams of fourth republic. All were not free and fair, in the true sense of the phrase.

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I still remember that Funsho Williams was leading in Lagos Guber polls after 18 LGAs were announced in 2003. Until Ikorodu and Epe results, conveniently delayed, came in. Kuforoji, the main political leader in Ikorodu eventually became Lagos Speaker.

The fact that political players who can compromise the system, do compromise it is not incredible. The benefits are enormous. What is rather amazing is that the people who bear the brunt of all these shenanigans accept the results of these polls. And don’t even audit the process or demand for credible improvement.

There are myriads of ways our polls are rigged. The most popular, but actually least effective, is paying voters for votes. This was very common in this last election. There is also the unauthorized access to ballot materials, prior to election. This is also common in Nigeria. And the general public don’t realize how easily it can be done. Then, there is the ubiquitous ballot snatching and stuffing. There is the result hijacking enroute to collation. Now that we use electronic voting machine for accreditation, there are many ways it can still be rigged. Simply removing the battery and spare for the machine in areas you intend to rig renders the machine useless. And incident form is no panacea, as you can bring as many people as possible to bear the names on the register and vote

133 Stopping Nonsense! for you. This was done massively in last general election, in many parts of the country. The EVS can also be perviously technically tinkered with, so that it will fail to capture some people. This is done in your opponent’s stronghold, with stern instructions to your agents to insist on EVS being used. This only leads to acrimony, and delays. The outcome is mainly the dispersal of many potential voters.

A competent programmer surreptitiously employed, and given access to the EVS can tweak the software for selected machines to be sent to your opponent’s stronghold. There it will mis-record the registered voters, so that total actual ballots will exceed the registered voters. Thereby leading to cancellation. And many more ways!

The purpose of outlining some of the rigging antics is to show Nigerians we are supposed to demand post-election audits! It’s not enough for losing candidates to go to tribunal, with inadequate evidence.

However it will be more effective if we demand more dependable electoral process. Many countries have faced this our current electoral challenges and found a credible way forward. We also need to. Nigeria deserves a better electoral process.

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We need a system that gives us credible outcomes. Such system should have three qualities: 1. It should keep digital tallies of votes cast, stored in the hard drive and memory card. This makes the result almost real time, and more difficult to falsify at collation.

2. It should print paper ballot of the vote cast, and have a ballot box for casting. The ballot is actually cast in a ballot box. It helps the voter confirm that what machine recorded is what he/she voted. It is also used for correlation of the digital result.

3. It should be able to have a memory you can’t alter. Similar to what you find in Aircraft’s black box. This acts as a third safeguard. If the three do not correspond exactly, you know there is compromise.

Such a system is already available, and being used in many countries including Venezuela, Belgium, Philippines and Brazil. The Venezuelan voting process is rated as one of the most efficient in the world. It’s a simple system that embraces all three criteria mentioned above, and has been adopted by Philippines. Results are almost real time.

And now voter turnout in these two countries are about the highest in the world. Because credibility has been restored to their electoral process.

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Nigeria needs same. The people need to start making credible demand for the change we need. Our electoral process is still highly compromised. If we don’t rescue it, we can’t start the journey to restoration.

It’s not just an opposition party problem. It’s a national problem.

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LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION...

July 2017

I have been watching with increasing dismay, as our Igbo astuteness is being disparaged. By ndi Igbo. The Mbaise/Ahiara dioceses against their Anambra co- priest, over his Bishop appointment. The Assemblies of God tussle over Church leadership, just recently settled by the apex Nigerian court. Now, the call for boycott of Anambra elections. And call for Referendum!

Let me start with the Referendum call. Anybody who is saying that Nnamdi Kanu is not an Igbo leader is misleading him or herself! Nnamdi Kanu has emerged as a bona fide Igbo leader because he seized a yawning vacuum, which all other Igbo politicians were too timid to seize or occupy. He may not be THE Igbo leader. We don't have one yet. But he is currently the most magnetic Igbo leader.

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Majority of Igbo youths are spontaneously drawn to him. For obvious reasons.

However I think the call made by him for UN or Federal Government to come and organise Referendum in Igbo land is abject propaganda!! I’m sure Mazi Kanu knows this. I am also sure millions among his followers don't know this!!! They believe and hope it will happen. This is where I am so saddened.

How can Nigeria government organise a Referendum that her laws do not recognise? How feasible?

Supposing the Nigeria government accepts to organise a Referendum, the moment they announce a timeline and institute the process, many people will head to court. Naturally, the courts will stop the process because it is currently illegal.

UN can't come to organise Referendum here either. The grand norm in Nigeria does not recognise Referendum, yet. UN respects the sovereignty of her member states. Moreover, who will secure the UN officials in Nigeria, if the federal government is averse to Referendum? The most UN can ever do, in the current situation, is call on

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Nigeria government to allow the people's will manifest. A rather bogus call.

The first step is to work and amend the Constitution, to allow Referendum for self-determination. Now to do this nearly impossible task, requires participating in body politics of the oppressive Nigerian country.

Considering our experience in Nigeria's politics, working for such constitutional change is almost hopeless. This explains the IPOB's clamour for election boycott, the second misadventure.

This call is even worse than attempting to amend the Constitution and failing. Boycott or no boycott, the election must hold! The fallout may be that Anambra gets its worst government ever. Another fallout will be massive deployment of the police & military forces in Anambra, further making my state an occupied territory.

No one can convince Ndi Anambra that the government of Peter Obi was foisted on us by Hausa-Fulani. No one can convince Ndi Anambra that Willie Obiano was foisted on us by Hausa-Fulani. These two governments

139 Stopping Nonsense! were the choices of Anambra people. The more reason why they have worked for Ndi Anambra.

We will want to still make our own choice for who will be our next governor! We won't accept Hausa-Fulani or Yoruba or Igala or even Onye Abia to make that choice for us. Why? Because in the 3 elections that we chose our governors by popular will, it has turned out well for us. As an interim measure. Until we leave Nigeria or embrace true and unhindered federalism, let us choose our governors!

Maybe Mazi Kanu was acting from his hitherto poor outcomes from Umuahia government House. Anambra has been luckier than Abia in governance, no doubt. So I don't begrudge Nnamdi Kanu on this call for boycott. But it is better he drops the matter henceforth.

I am still waiting for a Pan-Igbo conference, to actually deliberate on What Ndi Igbo really wants. Is it Biafra? Is it Restructuring? Is it Federalism? Is it Confederacy? As far as I am concerned, despite my bias, I still think what the majority of Igbos at home & in Diaspora want, has not been distilled!!!

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Let us start from there. The struggle should not go illegal, please.

Please, lead our youths not into temptation! My name is Olisa Akukwe. And I still want to #StopNonsense.

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.... DAMASCUS EXPERIENCE CONTINUES

December 2016

There was a time, just few years back, when the Goodluck Jonathan's government was "stealing" money in Trillions of Naira. And the "evidence" was "all over the place!” You can read it in national dailies, see it on national television, and hear it in beer parlours. El Rufai itemised it. Buhari documented it. Lai Mohammed broadcasted it. Fashola bemoaned it. The people wept about it. The loots were so enormous, ostentatious and obvious that we just needed a new government of "saints" to recover Trillions and Trillions of Naira and dollars. The arrests and prosecutions will be en masse! The recovered loots will fund multiple cycles of infrastructure and social investments. In fact, it would be so enormous, that Nigerians will call for capital punishment for the officials of Goodluck administration.

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The national economy of almost 100 trillion Naira was shut down via capital controls to "catch" the looters. The economy inevitably started shrinking, but we were recovering these massive loots. Until propaganda ran into reality!

After 4 million jobs have been lost and countless companies shut down, we are informed that a phenomenal sum of ...258 billion Naira has been recovered from Goodluck's administration. And this includes 70 billion Naira from Abacha loot o. According to Federal Government. In other words, 188 billion Naira has been recovered from Goodluck's government. The government that looted "Trillions" and the evidence was "everywhere"? To put it in perspective, the recovered amount after almost 2 years of recovering loots that was soo massive and obvious, is about 1.8% of Nigeria's GDP, when Buhari took office! The economy was growing about 6% when Buhari took office, but now is shrinking by about 2%. A whooping 8% loss in GDP growth, to recover loots of 1.8% of GDP. This is what happens when you run and rule via malignant propaganda, rather than dynamic policy proposal and implementation!

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Now, the loots are no longer so "evident"! It is no longer "everywhere"! We now need commissions to ferret out loots. A new occupation has been created overnight: Loot Agents! You receive 5% of any loot you are able to inform government about. Propaganda has jammed reality!!! Nigerians have paid a heavy price for banking with propaganda. We are now coming home. Our Damascus experience continues... My name is Olisa Akukwe. And I still want to #STOPNONSENSE.

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ATIKU/OBI TICKET: AN EXCELLENT CHOICE!

October 2018

A couple of persons have asked me privately, publicly & personally what I think about this ticket. Some have suggested a SW VP candidate would have been a better choice. Here is my opinion: This is a most excellent choice!!! Considering my understanding of Politics, if Atiku had picked from SW; I would have known he is an Overrated Political strategist. Picking Obi confirmed he is grounded in Politics. I personally don't mind a SW VP. Just like many Igbos don't mind. But in Politics, it's pragmatism that works!!

1. GEJ had no SW VP. Nor SW SP. Nor SW speaker. Nor SW CJ. But he still go 45% of votes in SW. 2. PDP has consistently got about 45% of votes in the SW

145 Stopping Nonsense! gubernatorial elections, since 2015. Despite the APC machinery. 3. No politician of stature in PDP SW. They have all decamped. Adewunmi has no Political value that he will add. No Political base. He can't move the needle. He can't make any change in the PDP 40-45% vote base in SW. 4. Peter Obi is very popular among progressive Yorubas of all ages. If you crawl social media spaces, you will find he was very well received by many people that were sceptical of Atiku. 5. PDP knows that the challenge in Igboland is POLITICAL APATHY! Even in the last election billed as "2nd civil war"; Igboland had the least turnout in percentage. Now add the IPOB "No lefelendum, no election" and you can get serious apathy in Igboland. Despite all our usual noise before election. But with a competent & admired son-of-the-soil on the ticket, he will use his Political network & other networks to energise the SE. Now, door to door mobilization can work in SE. 6. With APC controlling the entire SW Govt houses by 2019 election. And Tinubu being the single most influential politician in that region, a SW VP candidate will not get PDP more than their usual 45% in that

146 Stopping Nonsense! region. Atiku knows APC will ultimately win SW. Except Tinubu recants. The game is to maintain the 40- 45% margin, which this ticket will! 7. The major aim in SW will be to try & win Lagos. With the massive Igbo votes there (galvanized by an Igbo on the PDP ticket); the PDP support base and those disenchanted by the Ambode treatment; Atiku will go all out for Lagos!

So from the standpoint of Political sagacity, this was a most inspired choice. The only thing that could have been marginally better would be an Atiku/Soludo ticket. But I think Soludo is still in APGA (party with no compass).

However Nigerians should demand more. Remember PDP was a party of impunity last time it held power for 16years. The difference was that it handled the economy far better than rudderless APC. APC has also surpassed it in impunity now.

So Nigerians should demand that those formerly involved in the past PDP impunities should only have marginal involvement in any new PDP government, if they win. That guarantee should be given now.

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That, with the guarantee on comprehensive, though graduated restructuring, should be basis for massive mobilization for the ticket.

My opinion. Olisa Akukwe.

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HAND-ME DOWN POLICY!

August 2015

I remember those periods while growing up, that you always wish to forget. Among them is when you have outgrown your church dress but your parents have not bought you a new one. I would put on my old trouser and it won't reach the ankle. My leg would not enter my outgrown shoe. My mum would take one look at me and resort to her classic solution. She grabs my brother, Obinna's trouser and shoe (more likely, his Cortina). The problem will be that the trouser is too long. The shoe is too big. What next, she puts me in the trouser. Uses the belt to force fit the waist. Folds the trouser two times, so it stops at my ankle. And the shoes, the left is stuffed with Daily star newspaper and Satellite newspaper is stuffed in the right. Then my leg can fit. The result, I look like a character from Nickoledeon. And painfully, I KNOW it. This is how I had to look sometimes, while going for 7am mass at Sacred Heart

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Enugu when Fr Aluma was the parish priest.

Nigeria maybe suffering similar fate now. We are at that time of parenthesis, between third world and second world status. We have shopping malls but people still hawk by the road side. We have 6 star private hospitals, yet people deliver at home. We have satellite dish yet battery radio is the major means of news dissemination.

This brings me to the issue. WHY is Abuja Environmental Protection Board seizing and destroying goods of street sellers? Don't they know we are still in a period of social transition? The developed countries they claim to emulate PAY jobless and poor people a minimum token. USA even gives them food stamp and pay their health bill using Medicaid. Here nobody caters for them. When they choose to hustle and eke a token, you destroy it, harrass them and eventually radicalise them. AEPB even employs touts, thugs and goons to do this job!!!!! Imagine that. Is that what is done in developed countries?

A society in transition must learn how to manage the maternity of change, to avoid social, financial, moral

150 Stopping Nonsense! and ethical dislocation. AEPB and others like it in Nigeria fails on all measures. WARNING.

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IT'S MORNING YET!

July 2017

Yesterday, I wrote and published in the social media, my opinion on the call for boycott of Anambra election and call for Referendum. In the ensuing debate, I read all sorts of arguments on why Referendum will come from boycott, amidst dollops of unhinged insults!

Initially I took some of the arguments as mere attempts to win a diatribe with cheap shots. But as I began to read similar lines of dissection from even those I expected to know, I concluded that the discourse needed more depth. Of course the retailers in insults are still welcome. They will surely learn a few things, though without acknowledgement. One of the arguments was that Bakassi peninsula was excised from Nigeria, without Referendum. Likewise, it

152 Stopping Nonsense! has become a precedence for Biafra leaving Nigeria. I attempted to set that record straight in the follow up comments. However for clarity, I will repeat it here.

Bakassi case has nothing in common with the Biafran struggle, sui generis. Bakassi matter was a case between two sovereign nations, Nigeria and Cameroun. Biafra case is not. In Bakassi matter, Cameroun took Nigeria to the international court of justice in Hague on March 28 1994, over her claims on Bakassi peninsula. The case lasted till October 2, 2002 when the ICJ ruled in favour of Cameroun. Both countries had already agreed to abide by the judgement before the case ensued.

It is important to note that the ICJ entertains only cases between Sovereign nations!! ICJ cannot, under any international law, entertain a case brought by Biafra advocates against Nigeria. This is law, not sentiments. Biafra is not a Sovereign nation, yet!

Another argument projected, under thunderous insults, was how any Constitution that stands in variance with international Human Rights laws of UN cannot stand!! This argument was repeated with such certainty. I found it crazily esoteric!

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I wondered how come North Korea still exists. I wondered how come Myanmar still operates. I wondered how come all the military governments in Nigeria existed? I wondered how all the dictatorial governments in the world existed? When it's obvious they do not conform to international Human Rights laws? I discovered that even well learned Igbo persons are now substituting propaganda & conjecture, for knowledge and facts.

The much touted International Bill of Rights, was inaugurated via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by UN on 10, December 1948. It was followed in 1968 by the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, AND the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights. These three Covenant form the International Bill of Rights or the International Human Rights.

Self determination is the Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights AND on the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights. Self determination in these Covenants did not mandate specific policies, just like other rights in those Covenants and Declaration! In fact from the practice,

154 Stopping Nonsense! judgements and deliberations of UN human rights committee and Court, countries retain wide latitude on how they put all human rights into practice. All pragmatic leaders in this struggle must acknowledge that UN charter proclaims that it is based on "sovereign equality of all members"! The ICJ has no police force to enforce its judgement. It relies on the willing submission of member states. In extreme cases, on the force of powerful states against weak states.

So people who are thinking or feeling that UN will force Nigeria or compel Nigeria to conduct Referendum, are in dreamland! Nigeria and every country in the world break the laws contained in the International Bill of Rights. Each country break different ones, at different times depending on prevailing circumstances. Let us take Nigeria vs Nnamdi Kanu's case. Nigeria broke several of the International Bill of Rights, of which she is signatory, several times in the course of about 82 weeks Mazi Kanu was in detention! What did UN do? Nothing! Nnamdi Kanu was arbitrarily arrested and detained. This was against Article 9 of Universal Declaration and Article 9 of Covenant on Cultural & Political Rights. What did UN do? Nothing.

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Hearing before Independent & Impartial Judiciary is Article 10 of both Universal Declaration AND Covenant on Political Rights. Was it applied for Mazi Kanu? No. Did UN sanction Nigeria, No!

Presumption of innocence is Article 11 of the Universal Declaration and Article 15 of Covenant on Political Rights. Buhari, while Kanu was in detention, declared him guilty in a nationally televised interview. And vowed to keep Kanu jailed, irrespective of court ruling. A promise he kept. Did UN sanction him? No! I can go on and on!

The point is that these international Human Rights are often breached by Sovereign member nations of UN. Without consequences. Sovereignty often trump human rights in international politics! That is real politics. UN never sanctioned China over Tiannamen square incident. Only powerful nations like US imposed salutary sanctions, that were lifted not long after. Nigeria has breached and continues to breach a lot of the International Bill of Rights, which she is signatory to. Nigeria yet remains an influential UN member state. We need to know that it is only astute politics that can grant

156 Stopping Nonsense! ndi Igbo Biafra, if that is really what we want. Not boycotting politics. That call for boycott is simply an exercise in ego. Even after boycott, we must go back to politics to pursue actualisation.

It took the separatist movements of Spain 20 years to get devolution of power, and inclusion of Referendum in their statute. Everybody that follows International history will remember that the ETA aka Basque separatist movement used to be one of the most dreaded terrorist group in the world. They arose in the struggle for self determination for Basque country in Spain. However it took the formation of political parties that won control of Basque region in several elections, to engage Madrid & accomplish acceptance of Referendum.

Today I hear about Catalan Referendum. This was also achieved through political parties and political process, and like I pointed out earlier, took about 2 decades to be achieved. It was not done or accomplished by UN. It was by politics!!

We are not the only indigenous people seeking for self

157 Stopping Nonsense! determination, globally. We know the Scots are. The Quebecs are. Of course the Basques and Catalonians. For these regions, their Constitution or laws recognise Referendum.

However there is even an ethnic nation with a more compelling case for self determination. They have been fighting for it for decades, yet UN has not been the knight in shining armour some people try to make them in Biafra's case. I am talking of the Kurds of South East Turkey.

The Kurds are not even allowed to use Kurdish language in the schools in their region. They are not allowed to practice their cultural identity. The Turkish courts prevent Kurds from even giving their kids Kurdish names. If you broadcast in Kurdish you can go to jail. It is fair to say the Kurds probably are more discriminated against than the Igbos of Nigeria. Yet, UN has not rallied to force Turkey to grant them self determination or conduct Referendum for them. Turkey simply doesn't want to. And the Kurds after trying militancy via the PKK, has not fully unified in politics of emancipation. Hence they continue to suffer in the full glare of the world and UN!!

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The point of this message is to engage all energies of Ndi Igbo towards channelling our recent gains to the proper conduit. May we not waste the political capital of the Biafran movement. UN is not about to come and organise any Referendum. Neither are they going to force Nigeria to organise one. It is only by pulling our full political weight, as a people, through political negotiations with other ethnic nationalities that we can get Referendum into our Statutes. It can only come via political process. Except some people are secretly pining for war!!

Even after all boycottables are boycotted, we must make recourse to political process. Under the laws of Nigeria. Why not approach the struggle in a multi-faceted way? With pragmatic idealism. As Prof Chinua Achebe of hallowed memory wrote, "It's morning yet on creation day"! My name is Olisa Akukwe. And I still want to #StopNonsense.

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OGE ADIRO ... Politics for Restructuring.

December 2017

From now, till October 2018 is when the South East should play the Real Politics of Restructuring!! The PDP convention, at the heels of Atiku detection, has clearly unsettled APC! They can't even hide their jitters. The emergence of Uche Secondus, which many observers believe is an ill omen, is actually a very safe move by PDP. He doesn't have a perpetual EFCC noose around his political neck.

He has been a very loyal party worker. He has been in the national party administration for over a decade, so he has the background network. Though he may lack the personal clout, but he can build that. So the Vice President option is open not only to South

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East, but also South West. However PDP should NOT be the only plank for Igbo political aspirations now. This is the BEST time for APGA bu nke anyi.

The best time, if ever there was one, for APGA to expand beyond Anambra permanently. This is the time to commence the search for dynamic, honest, passionate and competent Igbo leaders to field as candidates, across Igbo land. My advice is to gun directly for Governorship of Imo and Abia States. Why? Clearly the lowest hanging political fruits, in terms of governance. Enugu and Ebonyi states are still political hegemonies, rigged with ruthless nonchalance. APGA has no hope in those two states in this electoral cycle, as far as governors are concerned. However HOA and HOR are positions APGA should field formidable candidates for, in all Ana Igbo. Time to start is now.

It is also very important that as APGA organise in Abia, Imo, Enugu and Ebonyi as they did in Anambra, they should work to produce a Presidential Candidate of Igbo origin!!

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An accomplished Igbo person, in private, public and cultural administration. Let ndi Igbo throw their hat, with clear plan and sagacity, into the presidential ring!! Irrespective of what happens in other parties. It is abundantly possible, with clear planning, defined strategies and definite goals to make resounding progress on Restructuring. Using the already opened election season. The Goals should be: 1. Win Imo, and deliver them from Statue to State. 2. Win Abia, and break the sordid holds of clannish godfathers. 3. Make inroads into Ebonyi and Enugu. 4. APGA bu nke anyi should win Igbo land in the Presidential election, to FORCE A RUN-OFF. Run off likely between APC and PDP. If this occurs, APGA can become the effective king makers. And Igbo leaders, if we are true and trusty, can use it to negotiate the first phase of Restructuring. Our support should then go to the leader willing to initiate the Restructuring process, with clear timelines, within the first 100 days.

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It is better to negotiate under an Igbo Party. The way Anambra has taught ACN, AC and APC to respect the Igbo resilience, has shown that an Igbo centric party is an essential tool in the quest for justice maka ndi Igbo. Taa bu Gbooo.

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RIGGING FOR DUMMIES: THE PLAYBOOK.

January 2019

I am sorry to say o, but the election has been rigged already!

1. Have strategists really asked why is Dasuki in jail? Why is Metuh in jail? Why was Akpabio harangued into defection? Why is FFK under incessant litigation? Why was Obanikoro harrased into 'born again' APC chieftain? Why is Orji Uzor Kalu on an EFCC leash? Why is Magu unconfirmed yet in power? Many people don't know the link. It's all about FUNDS. All of the above events are purposed to deny PDP access to election funds. Any source(s) of potential PDP funds is placed under intense hostility. Either you join APC or you shall never have peace nor unbridled access to the

164 Stopping Nonsense! funds. While APC have been using vote buying to advance their victories (Edo, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti). TraderMoni. N- power. Outright vote buying. All these have been tested & confirmed. Obi & Atiku are under intense scrutiny and obstruction, finance wise. Atiku, Obi and PDP needs to spend (move) tons of money in the last 2 weeks to election. Everything is being done to stall it. Even if it may include unofficial freezing of ANY account that is suspected to be linked to PDP.

2. The APC primaries: This was used to create a ruse in the international community of MASSIVE support for Buhari. 5 million votes in Kano. 3.5million in Lagos, etc. By now, PDP should have gotten satellite imageries of many of those states that claimed those massive turnouts, for that day. That could have been used to show the international community it was all scam. But nothing. Post election, this will be used to 'prove' to international community that the massive 'votes' that may accrue to APC is historical.

3. Collation: Our elections are rigged at collation! The senate passed a bill for electronic transmission of

165 Stopping Nonsense! results, instantly.

Buhari killed it. Collation is still the dead zone. It's where they monitor the incoming results & know where/how to adjust returns in other to overturn defeats. That was what Buhari was likely referring to as "winning by remote" in his visit to Osun last week. It happened in Edo, Osun, Ekiti and Ondo.

4. Outright violence: The entire command of legitimate force, often used illegitimately, is in their control. And they have not shied away from using it. Often times, in close races, APC combine the use of state and non state force to unleash violence. It helped them win Ondo and Osun. Another perfected method.

5. Accreditation & Voting: You accredit, vote and go home. This keeps polling units scanty, and calm. Reduces significantly the people that will stay back for counting and "defending of votes". Making manipulation even possible at the polling level.

6. Fooling International community:With the method of vote and go home, the international community will

166 Stopping Nonsense! inevitably report free & peaceful election. By allowing them come into the collation center, they will be fooled into thinking there is openness. Meanwhile, the main collation is happening at the COLLATION SECRETARIAT, which is not only out of bounds to observers; but also under publicised.

7. The moves against the supreme court judges previously, and now the CJN has put all Judges in Nigeria on Notice! Play ball or lose your 3 to 4 million naira monthly income & allowances. Apart from having your name dragged in mud. So, my people, under this dictatorship, consider the election rigged already!

***What can be done: PDP has to really create an international community committee. Sit down with all the major & important International players, and show them the APC playbook. In details. All the party agents of PDP and allied parties, should be equipped with data gathering gadgets. The more stealth, the better. They should also be trained now in that relevant information gathering.

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The state of the nation address by Atiku is a good start. But it must be followed up by retail diplomacy in the global capitals. Mass information to voters imploring them to go back by 3pm when poll closes, for counting and announcement. Encourage people to load the polling units results online. Be ready for a protracted, post election, face-off. Anything less will not work!

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RIGGING IS NOT "UNCOMMON" IN AMERICA (Don't believe the mainstream propaganda).

November 2020

On national Election Day in year 2000, by 2.09am, the required vote margin to call the presidential election for George W Bush Jr appeared from Volusia County, Florida. The result, with the precise margin, appeared on the Volusia County election machine, supplied by Global Election System, now owned by Diebold. Bush had 51000 plus vote margin, with less than that outstanding. It was 26000 before then. Then the machine erroneously gave Gore -16,022. Yes, minus 16,022. Added another 4000 to Bush, plus another over 4000 Gore votes that went 'missing' in Brevard county. This made Fox News to call the election for Bush. In less than five minutes, NBC, CBS and ABC did same. By 3.15am same day, Al Gore called Bush privately, and conceded.

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By 3.45am, Mr Gore joined his motorcade to War Memorial Plaza, Nashville, Tennessee to give a public concessional speech. 3.55am, just two blocks from the plaza, Michael Whouley pages Gore's travelling chief of staff Michael Feldman and tells him the tabulation was wrong, as they have 'discovered' the machine in Volusia County and Brevard county, Florida were tampered with. Diebold later claimed it's "memory cards" were switched. 3.57am Gore was already at the Plaza, for his public concession speech. He was informed the actual count has him less than 1000 behind Bush, with Dade and Broward county still having many uncounted votes. 4.05am, the networks retract their calling of the election for Bush. 4.15am, Al Gore calls Bush again to retract his private concession. He didn't give the public concession speech planned that morning, at War Memorial Plaza Nashville Tennessee. Finally, the election was given to Bush, with final, official margin of 527 votes only. This was disputed, as we all know. A recount was instituted, with an audit. The Supreme Court effectively and ultimately stopped the recount, though it ACTUALLY SHOWED AL GORE

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WON FLORIDA, AND THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. In other words, George Bush stole the US Presidential Election, and nothing happened. So if any "ndi inteleshual" is telling you that Mr Trump has desecrated the altar of sacrosanct democracy by raising suspicion of presidential election stealing, tell them to slime off. There is a very recent, undisputed evidence of Presidential Election rigging in US. The beneficiary got away with it, and is still very much alive and happy. Rigging election in America is not uncommon. Forget what 'lie stream' media maybe spinning. This is nothing new. Al Gore was forever dumped in the shadow of history, by a rigged presidential election in US. Kennedy's victory against Nixon is still shrouded in the shady blanket of malpractice. The notorious magic margins that gave him narrow victories in Texas and Illinois, with their total 51 electoral votes made him president. He won the presidency by about 0.1% of the votes. The exact margin he needed was 'found' by Mayor Daley, of Chicago, Illinois. Nixon, then a sitting vice President, was asked to challenge the outcome in court, by his party. He refused, because he didn't want to ridicule US in the eyes of the world.

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Electoral irregularities are nothing new in US. It's just that the major networks don't want to emphasize them, especially if it doesn't serve their bias.

Just a few evidence. In Alabama 2002 general election, 6300 votes from Baldwin County disappeared overnight and flipped the Governor's race. The rightful winner asked for recount and was denied. Audit few months later showed the Governor sworn in, actually lost. Nothing happened. Same 2002 general election, a computer miscount overturned the House District 11 result in Wayne County, North Carolina. Luckily, a recount discovered 5500 more votes and the rightful winner was restored. In Dallas County, Texas, 41,015 votes were missed during the November 1998 election. The vote counting machine was 'programmed' not to count votes from 98 precincts. In Pima County, Arizona, vote counting machine recorded no votes in 24 precincts, in the 1998 general elections. In Nov 5 2002 election, in Broward county, Florida, over 103,222 votes were discovered not to have been counted by the voting machines. This was just 2 years after the same Florida was involved in Bush-Gore, missing votes

172 Stopping Nonsense! imbroglio. The recorded incidents go on and on. It is understandable that Mr Trump's haters hangs all their dark peeves like garlands on his neck. However, his suspicion of electoral malpractice is not out of tradition. There are so many inexplicable developments during this election. I don't know if there were malpractice or not, but as an ordinary student of US political tradition, I am also suspicious. I have never witnessed a US general Election that took half a week to produce a winner. I have never read of a US Election, from the election of John Adams till date, that took half a week to produce a winner or a tie. Even the tied Election of 1820 did not take so long to be announced. I saw a streaming of how the absentee ballots were being sorted. With the wizened eyes of a Nigeria election participant, I saw so many potential loopholes. I didn't see any diligent scrutinising of signature or even mail-in time. Just cursory perusal and then placed where it would be taken for counting. I wasn't impressed. I wonder how a much larger California and Florida could sort their absentee ballots so quickly and much smaller Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and

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Michigan took almost half a week. If Florida and California started counting absentee ballots early, what stopped the smaller States not to? Deliberate? For what purpose? Somehow, the votes harvested from absentee ballots in those smaller States are just enough to cover Mr Trump's leading margins. Whereas in the larger states that counted larger absentee ballots early, the exact margins couldn't be mustered. Am I missing something? I could not believe it when vote counters in Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, I think Georgia closed for hours. There was no arrangement for shifts and continuous counting? Absolutely disingenuous.

For me, these and many other irregular happenstances, necessitate a serious second look. Nothing unheard of in doing that. Hillary Clinton got recounts after she lost. The only challenge is that the time for investigation and litigation is not there. The FBI resources for thorough investigation is also scarce. Meanwhile, the inauguration is just about 10 weeks away. Nevertheless, there is need not just for a recount, but for a thorough investigation. I know that America electoral system is riddled with exploitable loopholes. I just

174 Stopping Nonsense! pointed out a few in this article. Many of them are from extensive research done by Bev Harris and David Allen. Others you can find in histories of particular elections.

Even though the outcome maybe too late to change the fate of US, it will help to show how robust the US electoral system is now. Whether the lessons of its past, rigged elections were well and worthily learnt. Legitimacy of this election, whether you like it or not, has been damaged. Only a thorough investigation can restore it.

OLISA AKUKWE Obata Uno Adinma.

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TURKEY IS THE TEMPLATE!!

May 2016

We live in interesting times. Many Nigerians wake up every day, scared! What's next, they wonder. Who is next, they drool. Where next, they ponder. Such is the uncertainty of life now. Will the herdsmen of terror strike? Or BH explode? Or Avengers detonate? Or tanker implode? Or pump price gyrate? But one thing is certain, and that is that APC is in power. To understand what is happening to us, we need to understand the inspiration and instincts of those pulling the lever. The new template of Nigeria governance is inspired by the Anatolia rising hegemon, Turkey. The fastest rising Islamic power in the world today. More influential in global geopolitics than Iran and Saudi Arabia, the hitherto Islamic powers. And its influence is more dramatic, because as recent as year 2000, Turkey was stuttering, blundering, sprawling nation.

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I don't care much about any religion. I think religion tends to divide, than unite. My holy book instructed us to worship God in truth and in spirit. So many people in all religion observe this injunction. But men and women hungry for power and influence also seize on religion to Rise and rule.

The recent rise of Turkey can be linked to the will, skill and cunning of one man, Reyep Erdorgan. Turkey's president. The ruling party in Nigeria, the APC, follows the Justice and Democratic (AK) Party of Turkey in eerily more ways than accidental. The ruling party in Turkey (AK) was founded in 2001. In 2002, they won Turkey's national election. Like APC. They ran on an anti-corruption ticket. Any similarity? The Turkey ruling party at inception was an aggregation of hard-core Islamists (Kwankwaso dem), traditional religious fraternities (Zakzaky dem), Islamist modernisers (El Rufai dem), socially conservative businessmen (Abdulsalamad Rabiu of BUA dem) and secular reformists (Pat Utomi dem) The similarity continues. The Justice and Democratic (AK) party has its core of support in the north and west of Turkey, a zone regarded as a 'Koran belt' of Turkey. APC has its support base in the North and west of

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Nigeria. Interestingly, our own 'Koran belt'. Close to half of our Yoruba brothers practice the Muslim faith.

Erdorgan, when he came to power, started massive trials of corrupt individuals and institutions. Much to the delight of Turkish citizens. He also adroitly shifted the party power base to the Islamist core of the party. He also rolled out massive social programmes in housing, health etc. While allowing most of all the Islamic social practices that Kamel Attaturk banned to come back and flourish. Attaturk diligently tried to keep Turkey secular, but the Islamist core of the Justice and Democratic party,where Erdorgan belongs, have reversed many of those policies. Just this year, a vote to formally change Turkey's designation to Islamic Republic of Turkey was only narrowly defeated. It will come back.

Erdogans popularity came from his being jailed in 1998 for "inciting hatred based on religious differences"! Muslims quickly embraced him. And he rode that to become mayor of Istanbul. Buhari's popularity rose with his support of Sharia when other northern politicians were being too modest. The south east of Turkey is populated by the separatist

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Kurds. Similar to south east of Nigeria. The Kurds have been agitating for independence from a suffocating union in Turkey. The political party controlling most part of the south east of Turkey is called Peoples Democratic party (HDP).

The Islamist party ruling Turkey has been in power now close to two decades, having used a combination of anti- corruption fight and intimidation to decimate the former ruling party. Same fate awaits Nigeria and PDP. Except the people open their eyes and mind. The Turkey ruling party has also done well economically, while advancing other Islamic agenda. If APC gets the economy right, Nigeria will go same way!

The PDP and other core corruption Nexus in Nigeria are in full retreat. They know what is going on, but they can't do anything. Their hands are soiled, like in Turkey. Turkey has an agenda. The core of that agenda is the resurgence of Islam.

Through Turkey, 2 million Islamic refugees are in or about to enter Europe. It is noteworthy that Syria is closer to Turkey's Eastern border that abuts Iran, Armenia, Georgia. But the only land border Turkey has

179 Stopping Nonsense! with the west (Europe) is Bulgaria. Over 1000 km from Syria. Yet that is where they direct all the Syrian refugees to.

The marauding herdsmen is not less similar. There is a grand design. The vital centre of this design is global. The core of the APC as well as of the ruling Justice and Democratic party in Turkey is Sunni Muslim. There is nothing wrong with sunni Muslim or any Muslim. But there is everything wrong when leaders use religion to gain and control the levers of power. Study Turkey. And you will understand where we are headed. The iceberg is getting closer.

My name is Olisa Akukwe. And I still want to #StopNonsense.

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WHY JERUSALEM? ...The diplomatic Golgotha. (Part 1)

December 2017

Since the single minded American President announced that America recognises Jerusalem, as the capital of Israel, the response has been riotous. The usual Arab and Muslim condemnation had ensued. The EU and UN have also lent their increasingly confusing voice. Christian fundamentalists have declared it as victory of biblical proportions. Muslim fanatics are seeing it as a call to arms. In all these, I keep sifting to see a dissection of the issue, prior and retro, from a perspective of realism. I simply aim to do a factual interrogation of the Jerusalem, Israeli/Palestinians conundrum. In the final count, it's proper to say that it's complicated!!

But first, before I delve into the facts of history on this issue, let me proffer my personal opinion on the action

181 Stopping Nonsense! of Mr Trump. This is my opinion, from a geopolitical perspective, if I was in his shoes. Will I recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital? Yes, I would. Would I relocate US embassy to Jerusalem? No I would not. On the first question, how realistic is the solution of declaring one small city as the capital of two countries? Two feuding nations. Two countries with diametrically opposite religion and culture. To share one small city as a common capital. That solution is the real disaster recipe. Imagine asking Lagos and Ogun states to share Ikeja as capital. These are same ethnic stock. Or asking Anambra and Enugu states to share Enugu city as capital. Imagine the depth of animosity and strife these can perpetuate on a daily basis. Then transpose such a solution on two villous feuding nations. That sharing capital as a solution, should have been jettisoned long ago. There are multiple other areas of disagreements that the International community should force Israel to do some concessions, for Jerusalem to be a united capital. Rather than the horrific trap of one capital for two countries.

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On the second question, geographically Jerusalem is of little advantage. Even Israel pushing for it to be their indivisible capital is simply for its mythic significance. Jerusalem has no airport, no seaport, no river, no industrial base, no natural resources. It measures about 125 square KM only. That's about 8% the size of Abuja or 20% size of Enugu city. Strategically it offers nothing. It's the long, deep and mythic religious symbolisms that remains its allure to mankind. So I do not see the value of US shifting her embassy to Jerusalem. The recognition is enough. Israel can live with that.

It is also important to reiterate that Mr Trump did not declare Jerusalem, Israel's capital. He simply recognised it. Israel can lay a longer historical claim to Jerusalem. Note that I am not talking biblical claim. But the ethnic stocks from which modern day Jews descend, historically, have a firmer claim on Jerusalem. The Arabs who have also inhabited the area for close to 1000 years have a historical claim to the land. They have a right to be citizens of Jerusalem, irrespective of its capital status. So the Arabs of Jerusalem must be equal citizens of Jerusalem, and by extension Israel. This should be among the conditionalities of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

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However, Israel's claim to Jerusalem, predates by millennia any Arab claim to it. Let us now delve into the relevant historical facts. (...to be continued) Olisa Akukwe

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WHY JERUSALEM? ...The diplomatic Golgotha (Part 2)

December 2017

Having ventured my personal opinion on why I think Mr Trump was right to recognise Jerusalem, as Israeli capital; I now wish to put a proper context to Jerusalem as a metaphor for fallibility of Diplomacy. The fundamental crux of the Israeli/Palestine crisis is that Arabs (NB: Arabs not Palestinians) claim all the land, including Jerusalem, belong to them. Whereas Jews wanted a 'national home' and believed the present Israel had been their home. That is the fundamental crux, but from it stemmed myriad other collaterals. As is totally agreed by historians of all shades, a collection of Hebraic kingdoms that are the distant progenitors of today's Jews, lived in the region of present day Israel. The current West Bank was where the Kingdoms of Samaria and Judea were located. Kingdom of Galilee was south east of Sea of Galilee, in

185 Stopping Nonsense! today's northern Israel. In Jerusalem itself, Mount Moria was where Judaism stated that Solomon's Temple was built. The rock upon which Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac stands directly above the Holy of Holies of King Solomon's Temple, according to Judaic lore.

It's interesting to note that it's this same rock that Islam believes Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven from. And on it is built the (Furthest Mosque) or Al Aqsa. That Judaism, Islam and Christianity share the exact same geographic symbolisms in Jerusalem, is a product of the very complicated political history of the Levant. The Jews had lived side by side with Arabs for millennia. The region of Israel and the Levant, because of its strategic location as a kind of bridge between the Western world and the East, had always been under contention by world powers. It had been conquered by the Persians (current Iran), M e s o p o t a m i a ( I r a q ) d u r i n g t h e r e i g n o f Nebuchadnezzar, the Romans (who sacked and dispersed the Jews in AD70, after a rebellion), Mongols, Arabs of the great Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo, the Turks of Ottoman empire and the British. Not to include the

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Christian Crusades for conquest of Jerusalem. Some of these empires ruled the Jews and Arabs for as long as 400 years. Some allowed them to thrive, provided they paid their taxes and tributes, like the Ottomans and Mamluks. Some took them as Golden Refugees to help grow their economy, like the Mesopotamians. Some simply ravished (Mongols) or dispersed them in retribution.

It's important to note that many times, the ancient Jews suffered together with the Arabs. The periods when Arabs or Muslim Turks ruled the Jews where when they had the most freedom! In other words, the Jews for millennia, historically saw Arabs as protectors. Despite the social strata that treated Jews as second class citizens. At least the Arabs were not anti-Semitic in ancient and medieval times. Unlike the Christians of those ages. The Christians treated the Jews as despicables. Anti-Semitism was practised primarily in Christian kingdoms. Christianity did not recognise the claim of Jews to Jerusalem, but rather saw Jerusalem as Christian property seized by Muslims. It was a Pope, Pope Urban 2, who in 1095, commissioned the first Crusading Knights, to conquer Jerusalem for

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Christianity. So the proprietary sense that Christians show over Jerusalem is surreal, since it actually flowed from violent appropriation. The return of world Jews to Palestine was at the initial stages in late 19th century an amicable process. The first waves of returnee Jews BOUGHT their lands from the Arabs! Over 100000 acres of land were bought before 1900. The funds were largely provided by Baron De Rothschild, probably the world's greatest banker, after De Medici.

The Arab resistance and resentment concerning the Jewish settlements actually started flaring with the rapidly increasing number of Jewish settlers, and the controversial Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Declaration that gave Jews a 'National Home' in Palestine triggered the suspicion of Arabs. It's important to note that of all the opposition to Balfour Declaration, none talked of or mentioned Palestinian people! It was simply about Arabs and their land. Unlike the Jews, the Palestinians did not see themselves then as a distinct, ethnic or linguistic nation. The historical actions of the Zionist showed that they believed they could find an accommodation with the Arabs of Palestine.

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First, the Balfour Declaration did not give Israel a state. But simply a small 'National Home' within the larger Arab Palestine. The state would have eventually been an Arab Palestine State. The Jews accepted, but Arabs refused.

Few years later, the British proposed a mixed Palestine Legislative council that would pave the way for an independent, Arab Palestine State. The Council was to give Arabs perpetual Legislative majority, just like the British eventually did for Northern Nigeria. The Jewish leaders accepted, but the Arabs still rejected it. Again in 1937, the Peel Commission proposed partitioning Palestine by giving Jews a very tiny state, and the Arabs the rest. Jews accepted, Arabs rejected it. The size of Israel would have been less than 10% of its current size now, with this partition.

Again WoodHead Commission of 1938 proposed limiting the Autonomy of the Jewish state, to know if it will be more palatable for Arabs. Yet the Arabs rejected it. While the Jews were willing to accept it. In 1939, with the hope of winning Arab support against Nazi Germany, a White Paper was issued by Britain which proposed limiting the Jewish settlements, before

189 Stopping Nonsense! they can be given statehood. Yet the Arabs rejected this. After the 2nd world war in 1946, when Jews were now swarming into the 'homeland' in train loads, just to escape Europe's anti-Semitism; the allies came up with a plan to admit a final 100000 Jews only, into Palestine. Simply to curtail Jewish influx, and encourage Arabs to accept a small Jewish state. Yet, the Arabs refused! In 1947, the UN proposed the formal Two-state Solution, after the exhausted British had dumped the problem for them. This Two-state Solution was promptly rejected by the Arabs.

In May 14 of 1948, the day British mandate ended, Israel declared its independence, and was promptly recognised by Harry Truman, the US President. The very next day, 5 Arab states immediately attacked Israel, in the first of many Arab-Israeli wars.

With proper historical context, it's difficult to see Israel as the aggressor in this perennial Arab/Israel acrimony. Before the 3rd Arab/Israeli war, the 6 day war, West Bank was ruled by Jordan and Gaza was ruled by Egypt. None of these Arab Muslim countries gave the Palestinians those regions!! Today, the Arab Muslim world recognise that Gaza and West Bank belong to

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Palestine. But when they controlled it, it did not belong to Palestine! Israel seized Gaza, West Bank, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, during the 6 day war. Quadrupling the size of Israel in 6 days, after the unexpected attack by the Arab Muslim countries yet again, in 1967. They also captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in that war. It is evident Arab Muslim hypocrisy that when Egypt and Jordan controlled Gaza and West Bank respectively, as well as East Jerusalem; they did not cede it to their now beloved Palestinians.

The hypocrisy also shows in the fact that Palestinian refugees in the Arab Muslim countries, with their children, grand, great grand children are not granted citizenship status in those Arab Muslim countries. With the exception of Jordan. They remain perpetual refugees!!

Israel have ceded Gaza to Palestine. But for security purposes, blocked its borders with Israel. Egypt, an Arab Muslim country also blocked its borders with same Gaza! Yet, Arab Muslim nations are pushing Israel to open its borders with Gaza, as part of peace process negotiation. Hypocrisy.

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The fundamental crux remains that Arab Muslims feel that Israel is existing on Arab land, hence must be annihilated in the long run.

To this is added the anti-Jewish Islamic sentiments that began after the Balfour Declaration. It is now even more putrid than the Arab anti-Semitism. Iran, which is not an Arab nation is the most fervent anti-Israeli state in the world today.

Ultimately, whether Jerusalem was to be divided between Israel and Palestine or even given to Palestine, Israel knows that it's a nation born unintentionally in strife. And that as it searches for the elusive peace with her neighbours, it must first be SECURE! Jerusalem as united or divided capital is not what will bring peace to Middle East! For a long time, the Levant will remain a "Place of Skulls!”

Olisa Akukwe

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ON BIAFRA ....KA AKPAA YA AKPA.

July 2017

In Biafra, 1. Will the Constitution incorporate Self-determination?

2. Will Referendum be included in the Biafran Constitution? Will the Omambala people have the right to leave Biafra, if they want? What about the Nsukka people? Ndi Afikpo? Ndi Oguta? Ndi Ahiara etc.

3. Will there be 100% resource control by the constituent parts? As we are demanding from Nigeria now. Will Udi people control their coal resources? Will Nkalagu control their limestone? Will Omambala control their oil? Will Imo south control their oil? Or will the resources now belong to the 'center'? Just like in Nigeria now.

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4. Will Biafra Constitution end discrimination against women? Can females then inherit properties directly like males? Can women become traditional rulers? Can they become P.Gs of their town?

5. Will Biafran Constitution include affirmative actions to help disadvantaged areas? Will all university admission be by merit? Or do we reserve places for historically disadvantaged areas?

6. Will there be zoning for political appointments? Or will it be just by pure merit? Will the leadership rotate? Or outright competition?

7. Will we have local government police? Or will it be a Federal Biafran Police?

8. What will be the federating units? Is it the states created by North-Military complex? Or the local governments created by same ndi Ugwu? Or will it be the historical distinct dialectical groups in Igbo land? Or will it be the autonomous communities? The vital questions are many and varied. It's not just about ultimatums and rallies.

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Time to start asking ourselves the tough questions. Bottom line...Ka akpaa ya akpa!

*“Ka akpaa ya akpa” is Igbo for “Let us discuss and agree”.

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Theory of black swan events

“The Black Swan Theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist – a saying that became reinterpreted to teach a different lesson after black swans were discovered in the wild. The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is from the 2nd- century Roman poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”). When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is

196 Stopping Nonsense! potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic. The term Black Swan originates from the (Western) belief that all swans are white because these were the only ones accounted for. However, in 1697 the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Australia. This was an unexpected event in (scientific) history and profoundly changed zoology” Inspired by that monster of erudition.

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PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP AND VISION 2020

NOVEMBER 2008

Concession, or its popular moniker- Public-Private Partnerships, has a long but uncelebrated provenance. In the renaissance period, the German Emperor Charles V, in 1951, gave a monopoly concession to the family of Taxis to carry mails in his imperial domain. As late as 1810, the blue and silver uniform of the House of Taxiz was still very much evident on the pony express they operated throughout Europe. This may well be the longest concession in history! It is a vestige of the pervasiveness of the House of taxis franchise, that today ‘taxi-cabs’ are still very much with us.

Public-Private Partnership may simply be described as outsourcing of services and functions previously handled by the public sector, to the private sector. In reality, it is much more than this. As most things that

198 Stopping Nonsense! capture the imagination of the elites, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is now a buzz-word in Nigeria. A new catch-all phrase that has become a badge of reform, but with little appreciation for its multi-facets, potentials and challenges. Every mini-epoch in our nationhood has produced its own economic anthem. We have had nationalization; indigenization; commercialization; privatization; now Public-Private Partnership. The weak link in many of these past programmes had been low buy-in by majority of the elites and intellectual class in Nigeria, both in private and public sector. This poor buy-in was hinged mainly on poor understanding of the pros and cons of each of the economic initiative.

Public-Private partnerships are not new in Nigeria. It has never been the crux of any government initiative before as it is in President Yar’Adua’s government. Many (if not all) states and local governments have been operating PPPs for over three decades with Touts! We all know that motor parks all over Nigeria are operated by touts. They are formally or informally awarded CONCESSION on the parks by the state or local governments. This arrangement in all its opacity, lack of due process, absence of effective governance, dwarfed management principles, and kinship with violence

199 Stopping Nonsense! represents many of the pitfalls in concessioning in Nigeria. On the other hand, the fact that about 90% of Nigeria’s transportation is by land and over 70% of long trips in Nigeria originate or end in motor parks (with their touts) is a testimony on the resilience, potential and impact of the private sector.

However, the biggest area of PPP in Nigeria today is the oil sector. The poorly designed, loop-hole filled and corrupt joint ventures between NNPC and the oil majors is a standing monument to what we don’t want in the new concession regime. A new book titled CONCESSIONS IN NIGERIA – THE REALITY by Dr Joyce Wigwe, a consultant to public and private organizations for many years, as well as to major projects in the oil and gas sector, puts many of the potential pitfalls and operating mechanism in PPP, into perspective. It is pertinent to note that the government’s new love affair with the private sector is not born of altruism. The huge unfunded liabilities of the Nigerian nation is the major driving force. The infrastructure deficit that has imposed handcuffs on growth is impelling government towards PPP as a panacea to infrastructure dilapidation and under-development.

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Thankfully, there are many developing nations that have been and are on this path. So we do not lack for models, instead we need guidelines that will help us domesticate adopted models, with an eye on our peculiar socio-political environment. There is no doubt that if we do not tackle the infrastructure deficit, the Vision 2020 will simply become Vision 2040 – and beyond. Currently the 18th, 19th, and 20th economies in the world GDP ranking are: Belgium, Sweden, and Indonesia respectively. Belgium has a GDP (Exchange rate based) of about $448 billion and is growing by about 2.4%. Sweden has a GDP of about $444 billion and a 3.6% growth rate. Indonesia has about $432 billion and a 6.3% growth rate. Nigeria has about $167 billion and a 6.4% growth rate. All figures are as of December 2007. To be in the Top 20 economies by 2020, our economy may need to expand over 450% from its level as at December 2007. Quite a stretch, but attainable at a 13% annual compound growth rate! This may enable us overtake Belgium, the slowest growing economy in the lower rank of the Top 20.

In reality, Nigeria has to become a vastly different country by 2020 if that goal is to be achieved. For example, domestic oil consumption may leap from

201 Stopping Nonsense! about 200,000 b.p.d today to about 1.2million b.p.d by 2020. This implies at least tripling of our refining capacities, extensive Tank Farms construction, fuel depots, pipelines, tankers, filling stations, new roads, etc, Massive investments.

We currently have about 70 airports with about 36 of them having paved runways. We will need about 180 airports, with over 100 of them having paved runways by 2020, if Vision 2020 is on course. We have about 193000km of roads (paved and unpaved). Only about 30000km of these roads are paved, a mere 15% of total. We will need about 386000 km of roads by 2020, with about 270,000 km of them (70% of total) paved, if the Vision 2020 is on course. Then increase the railways from about 3000 km today to about 9000 km by 2020. Then add seaports, schools, hospital, prisons, etc and it becomes obvious why government needs private finance initiatives.

It is also important to remind Nigerians that Public- Private Partnerships are not limited to infrastructures. In every segment of public good, a private service provider under comprehensive but not suffocating guideline will likely do a better job than a bureaucracy.

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This is so important in Nigeria, where public spending in all tiers of government may exceed $150 billion, i.e about N17 trillion naira in public spending by 2020, if Vision 2020 is met, and current public spending trend continued. We are aware of the colossal waste and corruption at the current $30 million of public spending. If we do not get PPPs right in public services like education, health, immigration, customs, vehicle registrations, public procurements, land registrations, etc, we will be buried in intractable corruption by 2020.

It is also important to remind Nigerians that it is not only For-Profit organizations that do PPPs. TECNOLOGICO, a Not-For-Profit University, based in Monterrey, is working with the Mexican government on a scheme to deliver upper-secondary education through the internet to about 1000 communities in Mexico. Nevertheless, the norm is private, For-Profit companies partnering with governments. The best model in PPP as regards to Rule of Law, predictability, transparent government, innovativeness and fidelity between government and private sector is Chile. Nearly all Chile’s water is supplied by private companies. Almost all Chile’s new highways were privately built. Long term “Infrastructure bonds” denominated in

203 Stopping Nonsense! inflation-adjusted pesos have financed much of the $8 billion investment in Chile’s roads, airports, and the likes. Many infrastructure investors in Chile have refused to make similar investments in Brazil and Argentina, despite their giant opportunities compared to Chile. This is because the rule of law, and governance issues in both countries are rickety at best. Both countries are now attempting to remedy this, but they still have a long way to go. Brazil for instance, has re- negotiated 36% of concession contracts, at the instigation of politicians and bureaucrats. This type of rules changing during game, has been the bane of concessioning in many developing economies, especially Latin America. Recently, World Bank opened a “Partial risk guarantee” facility that protects investors in Peru’s roads, airports and ports from breaches of contract.

These and many other challenges can be adequately addressed in Nigeria if the legislative arm of government can set in motion the necessary machinery to bring about this much desired change in a beautiful fusion of the principle of rule of law and Private Finance Initiative, the two pillars of a potentially resurgent Nigeria.

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MASS HOUSING INITIATIVE: AN APPROACH

MARCH 2009

Mass Housing has become a revivalist initiative for all administrations in Nigeria. Every new administration embarks on a Mass Housing initiative. By the time the administration becomes old, it becomes obvious the housing initiative has failed. That is the Government housing initiative.

However, the private sector, to the limits of its constraints, has been the largest and most effective provider of shelter for Nigerians. The private sector, however, is severely constrained by bureaucratic and political sclerosis that stems from the public sector entirely! Even where the private sector appears to be benefiting perversely from an opaque market mechanism like land speculation and cement re- bagging, it does so because the public sector had created the lopsided opportunity. In other words, to turn the

205 Stopping Nonsense! chronic dream of mass housing into daily reality of decent and affordable living, fundamental changes in approach must be made. We will presently appraise the real and vital factors that are militating against mass housing but let us do some clarification first.

Home ownership and mass housing are not the same thing. Home ownership may be a core imperative in the mass housing scheme, but it is important to differentiate them so as not to build up unmanageable expectation. Citizens (Corporate or individual) that lack adequate income (adequate here having a wide latitude) cannot and usually do not own homes/offices, even in the most developed economies. However, this does not mean that they are ill housed. A recent entrant into the labour force usually cannot own a home in US because he lacks the savings to pay for a down payment. He has no history of paid employment or credit record.

H o we ve r, t h e r e a r e a d e q u a t e r e s i d e n t i a l accommodations that can be rented, likely on a weekly, bi- weekly or monthly arrangement rather than the typical 12 months to 24 months arrangement in Nigeria. The Nigeria approach has a fallout the typical overcrowding that you have in many urban homes,

206 Stopping Nonsense! especially among the young. Their income, where they have any, is usually too stretched. To have an effective mass-housing delivery the following must be instituted. i. Effective Land Tax against speculation. ii. Accessible and Reliable land registry. iii. Mortgage — backed securities market. iv. Targeted Loan guarantee Scheme. v. Training of intermediate construction skills. vi. Liberalizing the building material sector. vii. Inauguration of commercial courts.

I. EFFECTIVE LANDS TAX: I want to first remind us that it is antithetical to the free market mantra our technocrats have been chanting to have the state i.e. the public sector, own all the land in the nation. That is simply a Marxist practice. The land use act of 1978 definitely needs to be revisited. We however have to work around the obnoxious decree for now. Land allocation process in the country, amongst several shortcomings, promotes speculation as against development. The ratio of people who make a killing in land speculation as against profit from property development is, in my estimate about 30:1. Pause and

207 Stopping Nonsense! think about this. Think about yourself and people you know and mentally compare where they (and possibly you) have made much more money; is it in building/developing property or just holding land? Holding land in Nigeria has created perverse wealth that is second only to the perverse wealth that corruption created. This form of rent seeking behaviour has as its negative counterpart the unavailability of land for development, as the speculators hoard the land waiting for the developers, to bid up the price. This delays developments, makes the developments more expensive eventually, and this cost is transferred to the consumer. It also has the effect of turning potential developers to actual land speculators. Remember that when I talk about potential developers I am not referring to only big property firms, but also individuals who might be willing and able to develop properties. We are all aware that vacant lots, empty plots of land do not provide shelter.

Is there anybody who has not noticed the specter of empty, vast plots of land all over the urban centers, while developers only get to build meager developments in usually inaccessible areas where they were able to get land free of speculators most times?

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People will not be willing to go and live in those places because it is far removed from where jobs and city infrastructures are.

What do land speculators add to national development? Almost nothing! Almost because land can be a form of savings for individuals and organizations. So I am not against land as a saving instrument. But land as savings and land as speculation are largely different activities. How does land speculation work? (a) Lease land from the state paying official stipends and fat bribes. (b) Keep land title in a safe place. (c) The state uses common wealth to put infrastructure in the districts where land has been leased to speculators. (d) Land value increases fifteen folds. (e) Some lots are then developed. (f) Remaining vacant lots appreciates another five folds. (g) The area becomes hot spot because of increased demand. (h) Vacant lots increase another 10 folds. (i) Speculator sells to developer. (j) Developer can no longer build low cost housing,

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hence development of high-priced (high-class) houses. (k) Speculator makes 30 times (3000%) profit while adding zero value! There is something you may have missed from what I have just illustrated: the entire gains of the speculator come from values others have created. (I) The state puts infrastructure; speculator profits. (II) Developers build the lots they bought; speculator profits. (III) Infrastructure built with tax-payers funds, including budget appropriation from oil; speculator profits (IV) Individuals develop their lots; speculators profit. To promote actual development of office complexes, shopping malls, factories, and homes while discouraging speculation the following will be necessary: (1) Proper zoning of land use should be designated transparently. (2) Empty plots should be taxed at the same rate at which comparable developed plots are taxed. This implies that if a place is designated as a business district with minimum 7-storey complexes, an empty plot of land in this region should be taxed the same rate it will

210 Stopping Nonsense! attract if it were developed with a 7-storey complex. This means that if 7-storey complex in this zone pays 1 million naira on aggregate taxation because it is developed and occupied, then the occupier of the empty plots of equal size zoning will also pay 1 million naira on their undeveloped plot.

(3) Also a capital gain tax of 50% should apply to the sale of empty plots of land. This is because the externalities that make the empty lots to appreciate were not brought about by the landholder but are either due to public spending (infrastructure development, etc) or by private individuals/organization developing adjacent or neighborhood lots. So the gain from this speculation should be divided between the state (as custodian of the public good) and the speculator. (4) Another change should be a standing order that government should not allocate land except after providing infrastructure otherwise the allocations should be made on the written agreement that the buyers will provide adequate infrastructure in the said zones within specified period. Of course, this provision of infrastructure will attract waiver on the capital gain tax.

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II. ACCESSIBLE AND RELIABLE LAND REGISTRY. The importance of land registration that is accessible and reliable cannot be over-emphasized. Thankfully developments in GPRS and digital data mapping are adequate to develop a national land registry in Nigeria. The digitized land registry should include: (i) All land with leasehold and no leasehold in Nigeria. (ii) Holders of the land title at any particular time. (iii) Date of initial title award and all subsequent change of ownership since then (iv) The prices of all the transactions on each title. (v) Outstanding litigations on each title. (vi) Zoning/use designation of each title. (vii) Procedure for legal acquisition of leasehold. It is obvious from the experience of FCT that developing a digital land registry is expensive. It has also become obvious that the FCT process has not made land acquisition for development or verification of a potential purchase any easier or transparent. Therefore the inherent lessons from the FCT’s good effort should be incorporated in the national roll out. The land registration may start with metropolitan areas in all the states as a first phase. Appraising the land market

212 Stopping Nonsense! should be as simple as appraising the stock market to improve efficiency in this very important market. It now becomes obvious that the situation where there are queues of land application (mainly by speculators) waiting for the signature of the governors and FCT ministers or their designates, sometimes up to 3 years is totally not feasible. There should be land officers, not higher than grade level 12, whose responsibilities should be appraising and approving or disapproving land applications within 30 days. These officers must however be forced to work within a very tight, laid - down procedure so as to minimize their taking decision based on their whims, predilections, or other sundry value considerations.

The rules of assessing each land application should be the only guiding principle. All interested parties should know these rules and all reasons for approval or disapproval should be stated clearly. It is on the basis of these rules that all issues of land allocation should be based. You either meet it or you do not. If several parties meet the requirements of a particular allocation and are all interested in the same allocation, then bidding should be done with the reserve price being the officially stipulated price per square meter. The highest

213 Stopping Nonsense! bidder then takes the allocation because it will be presumed that the development they are planning will have a higher economic future, otherwise they would not bid up the price. Remember that the cardinal point, as has been said earlier, is that government should not allocate zones with no infrastructure development, except where the buyers have agreed to put standard infrastructures within specified time limit.

III. TARGETED LOAN-GUARANTEE SCHEME: Most adults in Nigeria remember the Structural Adjustment Programme of Ibrahim Babangida. Most adults remember the Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) of Obasanjo's first term. We all remember the green revolution of Shagari, Operation Feed the Nation of General Obasanjo, and the Nationalization Programme of Gowon. What they have in common was socio-economic experiment that was not thought through. They were programmes that largely impoverished the people by socializing risk, among the masses and privatizing gains amongst top politicians and bureaucrats.

All these programmes simply put, were experiments with the people bearing the risk of failure, and indeed,

214 Stopping Nonsense! when they failed the people were drowned in the consequences. All socio-economic programmes in Nigeria have had as primary ingredient the people bearing the risk and the leaders pocketing the ill-gotten gains. I wish to ask, why can't the state start to take risk or even mitigate risks of her citizens?

Do you ever wonder why the much-lauded SME funds of banks are not having the expected impact? Ever wondered why the Federal government mortgage schemes have always failed? Ever wondered why Nigeria is a nation of potentials? Do you know the richest sector of the Nigeria economy? To answer the last question: the state, that is government, is the richest sector in Nigeria. The state controls about 75% of the entire income in Nigeria. From oil to gas to the 986,000 sq km of terrestrial territory, to the airwaves and the social capital used for law enforcements - the police, the armed forces, and the paramilitary.

Compare these massive assets to the states liabilities: education cost is paid by household/corporations to the tune of about 70% of total expenditure. Job creation is provided by the private sector to over 95% of the total. About 50% of national security cost is

215 Stopping Nonsense! borne by households/organizations in the form of vigilante payments, CCTV, security guard, and burglary resisting installations. Even the cost of justice is borne by the private sector to a large extent by way of legal fees, and lost time.

What you see here is huge state assets and meager state liabilities (despite all the pretending), which translates to mind blowing net worth at the government level: huge state sector income with much less state sector expense. This is the reason why there can be widespread misery in the nation while the state sector is flush with wealth and impervious to the suffering of the people. Now, why have I gone into all this elucidation? It is to show that the state can afford to mitigate some risk in the economy without in any way coming close to impoverishment. As a matter of fact, it is because of this public sector- private sector mismatch that we have had several symptoms like endemic corruption, crass public irresponsibility, gross financial misconducts, poverty, misery, and rickety infrastructures.

To kick-start the mortgage market, I propose what is the usual, recent conventional wisdom. That is, developing the securitization market by developing and packaging

216 Stopping Nonsense! mortgage--backed securities. I however insert a relevant twist: there should be a Federal/state loan guarantee scheme for low priced homes. By low priced homes I mean one bedroom flats priced below 1.5m naira and two bedroom flats priced below 2.6m naira. The government guarantee should cover 75% of the loan while the lending institution bears 25% of the risk. The guarantee should cover only this lower priced housing, which are the bulk of mass housing demand. The lending institutions however have the responsibility of doing due diligence on their borrowers. The essence of the guarantee is to cover borrower's default due to death, incapacitation, cyclical unemployment, and catastrophic accident. It is therefore very important that the private lenders do required due diligence in assessing income, regularity of income, family size, and outstanding borrower's liability in approving the loans. Some armchair critics may quickly say that ghost borrowers will take undue advantage of this scheme and therefore should not be implemented. I then ask: has ghost workers syndrome made us to suspend the civil service? Has bad roads made us to outlaw road travel? Has exam malpractice made us abandon exams nationwide? Moreover the ghost borrowers’ syndrome is likely over imagined. Remember the entire process

217 Stopping Nonsense! leaves financial footprints. Nobody pays cash to the borrower. The account of the verified home builders is simply credited by the lenders, while debiting the borrower's account.

This government loan guarantee scheme will help in kick-starting the securitization market. Most people who are players in the securitization market know that there usually is a form of credit-enhancement built into the pools of credit- backed securities that are sold to investors through the special purpose entities created to market these securities. For mortgage -backed bonds, it usually comes in form of mortgage insurance which is essentially what the government will provide for the mass housing segment of the real-estate sector. What we want to achieve is: (i) Government seeding the mortgage and by extension, the mortgage-backed securities market. (ii) Private sector creating the credit i.e. the money for borrowing. (iii) Private sector building the homes. (iv) Borrowers paying a small premium collected for government by the PMI as insurance premium. (v) The initial outlay of about one billion US dollars

218 Stopping Nonsense! from the external savings of the state sector used t o under write the scheme in the first 5years. This is the part of the funds of foreign reserve that has n o t been monetized probably about 1l billion US dollars total today. (vi) Increasing the confidence of the bank to lend long term to home owners since their risk has been systemically diminished to 25% of outlays. This w i l l also encourage, naturally, lower interest rates o n the lending. I am confident that if there is such a scheme, non- performing loans will never exceed 5% of the total in all the cycles. It is just important for the government to show the same level of confidence in her citizens for once. We will see the glorious manifestation of the banking sector lending about ten times of the insurance base over the coming years as they get to know their customers better and better. The targeted loan guarantee scheme is simply aimed at kick- starting this process.

IV. SECURITIZATION AND MORTGAGE: This simply implies re-packaging multiple individual mortgages into a pool of securities and sold to institutional and individual investors. This has the

219 Stopping Nonsense! effect of releasing fresh funds for further lending and further securitization. With the government home insurance scheme initiative, it will become much easier for the mortgage-backed securities to be marketed to international and domestic investors.

BENEFITS INCLUDE (1) Deeper pool of funds for lending to home owners. (2) New pea businesses for the financial institutions involved. (3) Wilder investable assets for investors. (4) Deepening and broadening of the stock market. (5) Development of new talents in the financial sector with better human capital development impact. (6) Downward pressure on rent inflation as more people own their homes and leave the rental market.

V. TRAINING FOR INTERMEDIATE SKILLS: We have seen several and increasing cases of collapsed buildings in Nigeria. Yet we do not have a construction boom yet! What do you think will happen if construction activity significantly picks up? Likely more collapses, government investigations, and white

220 Stopping Nonsense! papers. One of the primary reasons for the shoddy jobs we see in many sites is due to poor intermediate skills. We may have adequate architects and building engineers for the foreseeable rise in construction. After all, many of them arc idle, under employed or misemployed now. But what about the semi-skilled labour force in construction that make up the vital force of building development'? They are the plumbers, carpenters, painters, bricklayers, electricians, the draughtsman, etc.

Naturally if the investment in residential construction picks up because of the recommended changes in policy, the wages of the experienced semi-skilled workers in the industry will be bid up faster than their output. Other unskilled unemployed, seeing the increasing income of plumbers, carpenters, etc, will jump into the opportunity, untrained. They may bring down nominal increases in wage inflation, but their output will even lag their income more than the semi- skilled workers, which again leads to accelerating real increases in prices of homes. How do you stop this? After all, the cardinal aim of public policy should be to provide solutions before the society realizes that it has a problem.

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We have to start now to systematically train unskilled, unemployed Nigerians in the intermediate skills needed in the construction industry. The training must have a nationally recognized and approved curricular. It should also culminate in exams organized for the level of training, with awards of vocational diploma or certificate.

This will have the effect of training pools of idle mind and body, certifying them so they can seek work in any part of the country and standardizing the training. This will bring these likely discontented youths into the norms of working life, further reducing social exclusion. Moreover when the construction boom takes off, output and wage increases may likely keep pace, helping to moderate inflation.

Who will finance the training? It is obvious to anybody that understands the economics of externalities, that, individual organizations will not have the incentive to do mass training. After all, what is to prevent your competitor from poaching the talent you have invested so much in training? The impacts are likely wage warfare and wage inflation. The English called this the "tragedy of the common". An externality, to economists,

222 Stopping Nonsense! means an effect of market transactions that the market necessarily missed. The players in the construction industry will miss the coming wage inflation in that sub-sector, naturally. Just like secondary education, the public sector will do well in financing this training, even though the private sector may provide the training. This vocational training should not cost more than N30, 000 per person, and can be an important pillar of the NAPEP programme.

VI. LIBERALISING THE BUILDING MATERIALS SECTOR: We were all witness to the increase in price of cement per 20kg bag from N600.00 at the beginning of Obasanjo regime to N1950.00 by the end of his regime. It is true that global demand for cement by developing countries, mainly China & India increased prices, but nowhere in the neighborhood of over 250% in seven years. It is arguably the monopoly franchises handed over to major ruling party financiers through quota and tariff regimes that caused the hyper-inflation in cement prices. The government should, as a matter of policy, liberalize the building materials market from cement to aluminum, from paints to ceramics. All obnoxious tariff

223 Stopping Nonsense! and quota systems should be dismantled. The building materials that cannot be produced competitively should be imported If the manufacturers and value adding factories in building materials have access to cheaper credit their competitiveness will be enhanced. Of course better domestic infrastructures will also be a boost. But I do not see why consumers should be made to bear the double brunt of poor competitiveness of private companies and irresponsibility of past governments, in the form of exorbitant prices. Where imports of building materials will help to moderate domestic prices, it should be encouraged. Let us debunk some myths here. The bulk of spending in the construction industry even with full liberalisation will go to the domestic economy. Look at some: (1) Spending on land - domestic, haven't heard of land migrating (2) Spending on labour - domestic (3) Spending on sand - domestic (4) Spending on stones -domestic (5) Spending on cement -domestic/imports (6) Spending on paints- domestic (7) Spending on electrical- domestic mainly (8) Spending on plumbing- domestic mainly (9) Spending on roofing-domestic (on value added basis)

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But if you hand over the cement franchise to a few monopolists, cement being the blood of construction, you have simply handed over the power of life and death in that industry to a very, very, few What you will get is what we have had in the past 5 years, price gouging!

(VII) INAUGURATING COMMERCIAL COURTS The CBN governor, in his speech to the last NBA conference, called for commercial courts, where business cases can be dispatched quickly and effectively. This cannot be over- emphasized. A responsive and responsible legal system is a most important social capital for any society that wishes to develop her productive potential and attract investments. Commercial courts should be a constitutional provision like any other institution of its importance. We have a justice system that is obsessed with order as against justice. Procedures and technicalities override, in almost all the cases, real justice. No wonder the people usually do not trust any electoral tribunal to give justice since order and procedures are usually the grounds for striking off obvious injustice.

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As a first step to judicial system reform, the commercial courts with fewer obeisance to rules, order and technicalities and more focus on justice should be instituted. Its procedure can then act as template to reforming the entire judicial system. Without the ability to quickly resolve issues of default legally, the banks may not be willing to lend money to borrowers on a large scale. Judicial postponements are a real cost to business. Incidentally, many judges do not understand this.

There is no cool aid to economic development, but a holistic approach that unearths and explores linkages in the domestic and global economy, is usually more reliable than a doctrinaire, narrow perspective. Eclecticisms always win over dogmatism.

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DEMOCRACY: THE ELECTORAL PROCESS WE DESERVE

January 2010

Four hundred years before Christ was born, Cleon, a famous Athenian Statesman called for a rule “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Wyclif in a 14th century translation of the Bible repeated that truism. So did James Monroe in the 18th century and Daniel Webstar in his famous reply to Hayne in the US Senate in the 19th century. However, Abraham Lincoln tattooed the statement in the marbles of history in his Gettysburg address, with his sheer felicity of expression and flower of sincerity: “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. “...shall have a new birth of Freedom...” Today, more than ever, Nigeria is yearning for ‘a new birth of freedom’ founded on ‘government of the

227 Stopping Nonsense! people’! In less than a month, the Anambra gladiatorial gubernatorial election will once again re-open the festering sore of Nigeria’s elections. Unfortunately, we need not be witnesses to these Dracula dramas called elections in Nigeria.

I want to add some humble insights that could help us to midwife ‘a new birth of freedom’ that most Nigerians are yearning for. I would like us to examine electoral accidents from these perspectives: Credibility of Electoral bodies; Ballot boxes/papers misappropriation; Penalties for beneficiaries of rigged elections; logistics; Party-Police collusion; Opaque party primaries and penalty for all that are actively involved in rigging.

ON PENALTY: We may never witness true freedom in Nigeria, until punishment for those who benefit from rigged elections is enshrined in our constitution. It illustrates the truth in Jonathan Swift’s observation that the “law is like cobweb, it catches insects, but elephants barely notice it”. Otherwise, how do we explain the fact that those who receive stolen goods are punishable under our law, but those who receive stolen votes are allowed to rule, or at worst, allowed to re-contest an annulled election. What Shame! Recidivists of stolen

228 Stopping Nonsense! votes are in power at different levels and arms of government. It should be in our statutes, that any person that wins an election that is confirmed rigged by the law courts should be banned from holding any public position for two decades, of course the person will not qualify for re- contesting. Public position extends not just to government agencies but even to typical community groups.

We have to align the interest of political contestants to that of the electorate. I believe that if the political class understands that anyone that wins a rigged election stands the chance of political death, they will employ their vast leverage to thwart anybody that may want to rig on their behalf. We should make Electoral Recidivism highly ignoble! We should also make participating in electoral abortion that does not involve the law court, punishable with jail term. To achieve this, the, Evidence Act must be amended to admit electronic evidence! Making electronic evidence inadmissible in our courts is Judi-Legal sabotage. Also members of the electoral bodies that are involved in rigged election should also be jailed and banned from holding any public office for the rest of their life.

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BALLOT PAPERS: We must as a matter of survival embrace the use of ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE. It may need to be said here that it is the entrenched political manipulators and their agents, with their deep pockets, who have been most intransigent in their opposition to this innovation •

The electronic voting machines actually start combating rigging long before election day. Its talisman is biometrics, its secret lies with the voters’ registration. It captures the thumbprint of every registered voter, with their personal data. I may remind you that no two fingerprints are the same, so multiple registration is amputated. Multiple voting is annulled because the fingerprint is recognized only once. It uses battery. It is portable and leaves digital footprint of every single transaction. It is self-contained, and so no case of reprogramming has been reported in its over one decade of use in some countries. Even defeated candidates never blamed the machine, very unlike politicians. It is also cost-effective at about N30,000 per machine. Each machine can actually handle voters that make up four (4) polling stations in the current INEC arrangement. Over half a billion people recently voted in India, for over a month without much post-election

230 Stopping Nonsense! recrimination in the fractious Indian politics. Much to the merit of electronic voting machines. This is not to say that the electronic voting machine solves all voting problems. But it is a quantum leap better than what we are using now to deceive ourselves.

ON LOGISTICS: It is my opinion that all the logistics involved in moving materials and persons involved directly with elections be outsourced. This activity should be outsourced to private, world class firms. These firms (of which there are several) would have shown a track record of global logistics competence, especially in the rickety terrains of developing countries. It is nauseating when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), National Electoral Commission (NEC), or Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), etc tell us that difficult terrains are ‘delaying’ results from some places. Especially, but not limited to, the North-East and South-South during national elections. As if the terrain became ‘difficult’ overnight. These logistics companies with their bankers and insurers, should provide Federal and State authorities with indemnity bonds equal to the value of the contractual obligations. Where their performance is adjudged by pre-agreed objective criteria to be below

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80%, they will indemnify the state or the federal government the cost of the election or a pre-agreed indemnity sum. Nigeria will be pioneering in this field of electoral logistics outsourcing in developing countries. Firms that build competence in this area could find an annual $50 billion global market that is totally untapped. FEDECO, NEC and INEC failed in logistics management. Let’s challenge the ingenuity of the private sector.

INSECURITY & PARTY-POLICE COLLUSION: This is an almost hopeless situation. Why do police and some parties collude in manipulating votes as has been alleged? Is it obedience to Central Police Command? Is it for immediate financial gratification? Is it because they hate good governance? Is it because they are socio- paths? Most Nigerians may agree that immediate financial benefit may be the primary incentive. This leads to the next questions: Who pays the Police officially for electoral duties? How much are they paid? Is it on per day basis? Are they paid for that special duty? The answer to these questions maybe at the bottom of the problem. Tackling these challenges may necessitate some novel approach. What if police personnel on duty are paid

232 Stopping Nonsense! daily election allowance of ₦10,000 per person? What if this payment is based on objective performance like nil violence per duty post; enforcement of electoral rules on voting day; reports of party returning officers and observers per polling station? What if this payment is made directly to the police persons accounts by an NGO providing the support funds?

This might actually be an opportunity for the developed countries to assist developing democracies concretely by providing the funding for this payment scheme. I believe that independent pay-for- performance scheme on election day will change the behavior of a major and critical section of police persons and soldiers involved in electoral duties. We can even denominate the payment in dollars! After all, the officers and men of the Nigerian Police are always decorated for distinguished service when they go on United Nations (UN) postings. Maybe it’s the dollar effect.

ON PARTY PRIMARIES: We need fundamental re- appraisals of party primaries. We should forever abandon the practice of party conventions being used to elect candidates. The conventions, on election year,

233 Stopping Nonsense! should be used as platforms for presenting candidates that have won the primaries. During conventions, the financial, emotional, and psychological pressure on the delegates are exponential. They are harangued and hassled with money, job offers and blackmails. Many of them also come to haggle for vote selling.

The Electoral Act should clearly define party primary procedures, from who qualifies to vote in primaries to when primaries can be held. All primaries should be concluded at least five months before the particular election. All card-carrying members of a party at ward, local and state levels should be qualified to vote depending on if the election affects them. Hence in local government election, all wards in the local government are affected. In gubernatorial election, all wards in the state are affected, etc.

The only provision should be that they would have been card-carrying members of the party for at least three months prior to the primaries. Also, they can no longer vote in the primaries of another party, if they have voted in one already. Contravening this should be a criminal offence. So also, should be multiple party membership that is rampant at the grassroots!

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More so, the law should require all parties to submit a register of their members two months to the date of the primaries, to relevant INEC offices. This register should be open to anyone who wants to scrutinize or reproduce it, with INEC’s permission- Party executives or hierarchies choosing candidates should be outrightly banned, except where there is electoral tie in the particular primaries after ten successive rounds of voting. We must bring back decency to our party primaries.

CREDIBILITY: The prime practical approach to the issue of credibility of electoral is that appointment of Electoral body Chairman and Commissioners should be the responsibility of the judiciary at federal and state levels. Our democratic experience makes this an imperative. It does not in any way bestow the judiciary with the snow robes of innocence. It simply takes the reality of party politics in Nigeria as the locus of action. The judiciary is the only arm of government not involved in electioneering. However, the positions should be thrown open for transparent applications by eminent, qualified and interested Nigerians.

ON AD-HOC STAFF: How do you identify and verify

235 Stopping Nonsense! ad-hoc staff of INEC or State electoral commission? Which national identification system will you use? Until we have a comprehensive National Identity Card that is authentic, the idea of ad-hoc staff will continue to be a problem. My major concern is identification, not morality. This makes me think that using officers and men of customs, immigration, civil defense, and armed forces as ad-hoc staff may be ingenious. I believe these military and para-military agencies have superior staff identification systems than the typical Nigerian institutions.

INEC working with them may be a better proposition as opposed to using generally un-vetted ad-hoc staff from all over the place. Most times, you cannot track down an INEC ad-hoc staff after election, due to systemic failure of our, nation’s social security meshwork. This is no fault of the electoral bodies, but a little imagination while working with the military and para-military will minimize this challenge.

There you have it. My little contribution from my tiny corner of Nigeria’s socio-scape. Nigeria is not a hopeless nation. Her citizens are not helpless. The intellectual class is not bankrupt. The working class don’t have

236 Stopping Nonsense! change phobia. But we all need to join hands and hearts to checkmate an apparently fossilized political class. So “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. God bless Nigeria!

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THE WORD OF GOD IN THE LIFE AND MISSION OF THE CHURCH IN NIGERIA

2008

My sisters and brothers, it is with palpable humility that I stand to speak to you on this topic. My humility stems from the profoundness of the word of God and its inevitable fulfillment.

‘The word of God in the life and mission of the Church in Nigeria.’

This statement to me is riddled with questions. What is the word of God? How do we interpret it? Can the Church embody these words? What is the life of the Church? Is it mono dimension, dual dimension or multi-dimension? Does the life of the Church have consequences, for good or evil? What really is the mission of the Church in Nigeria? The questions continue to flood my thoughts but in any interaction of

238 Stopping Nonsense! civilized humans, opinions are stated as opinions and not as cast - iron facts. And so I venture forth some of my perceptions on some of the issues that the topic throws up.

“In the beginning, was the word; and the word was God; and the word was with God”. The word was the only tool of creation that we know from the Genesis. “Let there be ……“ was the primordial seed of Our Father’s creation on earth. Every deed, achievement, revolution starts its manifest existence with the word! No matter how pristine the thought is, how clear the mind is, for any large scale or important action to ensure, there must be the word. Spoken, written, the word must be the spark in the material existence.

This stems from the primus example of God in his creations and injunctions to us. In the book of God’s words he proclaimed “...unto this Rock I will build my house...” This proclamation brethrens, was the provenance of the Church. There are some other words that may be relevant to our discussion today. For instance ‘... Possess your possessions…’ ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers..’ ‘...Never you neglect the days of little beginning...” What about some words

239 Stopping Nonsense! of the Church? The Encyclicals of different popes like Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XVI; Pacem in Terris of Pope John XXIII; and Gaudium et Spes from the 2nd Vatican Council amongst numerous others have also issued statements and declarations that should guide us in the body of Christ, but we will come to them later.

The life of the Church in Nigeria. What life do you suppose we are talking about? Is it the chronological life of the Church? I think the Church is about 80 years in Nigeria. Older than the Nigeria - state. Or is it the multidimensional facets of life vis-à-vis spiritual, political, social, economic and humanitarian? There is no doubt that the Church has been as multidimensional as its members. Never-the-less, it may seem to some observers that the life of the Church has centered on the spiritual in Nigeria with cursory attention to the other facets. But on closer look, we may discern that the impact of the Church, though rooted in the spiritual is most critical in the political, socio- economic and humanitarian spheres. This brings us to the mission of the Church.

The mission of the Church in Nigeria. What, indeed, is the mission of the Church in Nigeria?

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What should it be? What will it be in a world that is changing at break neck speed? As the word says “...never you neglect the days of little beginning...” the Church’s start in Nigeria was not only inconspicuous but very humble. That we are where we are now is a testimony to the resilience, vision and hard work of the man and woman that God used to achieve his glory in our nation and to the inevitability of God’s proclamations. But in those days, the mission of the Church was simply evangelism, spreading the word. The Church was organized around this mission. Over time, as the impulse all over the globe continued to change, the Church responded with equal vigour. Indeed the Church led in many of the permanent changes in the world, without flaunting her immortal contributions. Many of you may have forgotten that it was the Church’s formation of the committee for, the formation of Catholic workers’ club that effectively started the labour unions as we know them. The works of Cardinal Mermillod and Count Franz Kuefstein of Austria in the Fribourg Union set the foundation for practices of Labour unions and workers groups all over the world.

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MANKIND In the chapter ‘COMMUNITY OF WORKERS’ in the publications of the conclusion of the 2nd Vatican Council, the Church wrote: ‘Human Institutions, both private and public must labor to minister to the dignity and purpose of man.’ This to me seems to justify the fact that the Church has taken its challenge beyond the simple spiritual needs of man. It is firmly pushing to expand the horizons of mankind, while living. The Church no longer accepts a merely esoteric responsibility. Being the oldest human institution, it has readily taken the responsibility to make the world a better place everyday, in everywhere. This is the challenge of the Church mission in Nigeria. To wet the hands of the people in the dews of new beginning; to wash the stains of Hell from the faces of the oppressed; to ensure that the lamp of freedom finds oil enough.

It was the Catholic Church that led and organised the resistance that threw out the autocratic government of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The Church actively supported the Polish ‘Gdansk’ that broke the chains of oppression in Poland. The Arch-bishop of Buenos Aires has consistently been the bulwark against dictatorship or quasi-dictatorship in Argentina. The Church in Manilla was the template on which the mass action that

242 Stopping Nonsense! toppled Estrada’s buffoonery leadership was built on. The Church can no longer afford the luxury of being a bystander in Nigeria. The Church and this includes you and me - can no longer be cocooned in a quiet and serene meadow, while the tempestuous struggle for liberation is going on all around her. The Church has to come out with a stated and published rule on looting of public funds; on leaders with stolen mandate; on exorbitant education and health care; on provisions for the incapacitated. Why do we have ex-communication for a man that marries a second wife, but not for a man that steals power through rigging? Or one that has stolen from the public purse? Why can’t we have a standing rule that critically demands that any public leader from the body of Christ, publish his assets in a Church gazette, as well as declare it in a government gazette? Why can’t the Church organize, in her typical meticulous method, to PREVENT electoral riggings in places where the Church is established? Why are the schools and hospitals established by the Church very expensive even though they provide very good services? I do not know the answers, but definitely these are some of the questions we must confront as we ponder on the word of God in the life and mission of the Church in Nigeria.

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Remember “You do not light a lantern and hide it under a bushel”. We are supposed to be the salt of the earth. May we not allow this salt to lose its taste - so that it is not cast and thrown away. Remain wonderfully blessed! Thank you very much.

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ONE EASTER DAY IN ENUGU

March 2016

A post by Ekene Okoye today took me, and many others, down some nostalgic lanes. It reminded me of an incident on one of those Easter Mondays. We were very young, innocent and hapless.

Easter in Enugu then was known for its masquerades, ogene, oji and drama at Obiagu Rd. It was fun and colourful. In fact, the masquerades usually start parading like 5 days to D-day, mainly at night. We the youngsters sometimes got our fair share of 'iti mmonwu'! On this particular Easter Monday, we borrowed an 'aji busu' from Chigbo Okeke (of O.C Gravel) through late Chekwube Okeke, his younger brother.

Chekwube decided I should wear the masquerade, a first for me. Chekwube, Okey, Nonso and Emmy Dokpu

245 Stopping Nonsense! joined the train. And we hit the road. The aim, like that of all the masquerades then, was to extort some money from the obliging public. And scare a lot more others. Chai!

We started the masked 'begging' and chasing of people, mainly young girls. Naturally, some adults obliged us with money. And I had incredible fun chasing girls and young women, who ran for dear life! I became a local terror inside that masquerade within a few minutes. I never knew life was so much fun behind a raffia masque.

We traversed Peter Okoye Street, hit Isuochi Street junction, turned left heading through Isuochi to Adelabu Street. Causing minor havocs. Nothing serious. While looking out for serious guys with serious masquerades, who could beat the hell out of us. And collect our 'aji busu', a fairly common event then.

It was here that I met my first test as an Enugu masquerade. As we were turning into Adelabu Street, there was a sudden pandemonium! People were running from all directions. Initially we thought our temporary notoriety had preceded us. But in a moment

246 Stopping Nonsense! we saw the real cause: NNUKWU MMANWU!! The big masquerade of a dreaded group called Rocky Barber was coming up! Oh, Jesus! Who put me in this aji busu o?!

As I turned to look for my group, I discovered they were already in full flight. J-E-S-U-S! Who sent me o? I turned and ran for dear, sweet life. But as I ran, the people and crowd in front of me ran even faster, with their screams getting more and more hysterical. As they screamed more, I ran even faster. And they screamed even louder! I thought their screams were a reminder of how imminent the danger behind me was.

As they ran inside a big super store by Isuochi/Adelabu junction, I also ran inside the super store. They ran behind the counter. And I followed. But they ran screaming through a backdoor to probably a room or passage. And I was running to barge through same door, for safety. It was then the owner barred the door and sternly queried me, "bia, does a masquerade run from a masquerade?"

Then I realised that the initial flight was from Rocky Barber. But all the subsequent screams and flights were

247 Stopping Nonsense! people running from me, a masquerade. And in my trepidation, I had totally forgotten I was still a Masquerade!

Cutting the story, I hid in the super store until Ndi Rocky Barber finished their majestic stroll through Isuochi Street. And I quickly fled home. Removed the aji busu, and bid iti mmonwu good-bye, till further notice.

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CAN'T COPE, MBOK.

July 2018

I don't know who watches world cup at home. I have tried and it never works out. A typical experience goes something below... ME: Nne, please give me the remote. Match has started. WIFE: Ooohh. It's time for Fresh Prince. ME: Fresh Prince? WIFE: Yes na. Fresh Prince of Bel Air. ME: Fresh Prince? That programme is 25 years old. Match is live!! WIFE: Baby m o. Don't worry it will soon end. (Meanwhile, the remote is nowhere to be found, as this goes on. After 25 minutes, Fresh Prince ends.) ME: Nne, Fresh Prince has ended, please put ball now. WIFE: Nooo. That one was repeat. Today's episode will start soon. ME: What? (getting exasperated) You mean you watched this one before? And just wasted almost entire

249 Stopping Nonsense! first half watching it again? WIFE: Ehe, this is today's episode (brings out coke and groundnut, and settles comfortably) ME: (Being frustrated, reaches for my tablet. Goes online to goal.com to follow text commentary). (Later Fresh Prince ends.) ME: Nne ngwanu, put ball. WIFE: Baby there's Blackish coming up. (Makes face like someone stabbed) ME: Don't worry, when DSTV expires, don't come and ask me for renewal. (Focuses on Text commentary fully) (When Blackish ends...) WIFE: Baby I have put ball (meanwhile it's 75 minutes now) ME: (No answer. Thoroughly annoyed. Drops tablet to watch remaining 15 minutes) WIFE: Why does Iniesta play every match? Every match I hear his name. ME: (in annoyance).. Because his family owns the stadium. Please leave me to watch the remaining match. WIFE: It's a lie. Govt owns the stadium. But every match, Iniesta will play. Ndi red are playing better than Ndi white. ME: oh chim. Please can you watch without talking? WIFE: (Quiet for a moment). Is it ESPN versus Russia? I

250 Stopping Nonsense! thought ESPN is a network? ME: (In frustration). Yes, ESPN is playing Russia. Sometimes Network play Nation. WIFE: It's a lie. World cup is country to country. What of Arsene Venger, which country is he playing for? ME: Jamaica. WIFE: Jamaica don't play ball. Dey play Reggae. You don't want to answer me. (Small Pause) WIFE: Why didn't Kanu Nwankwo and Okocha play for Nigeria? And now dey removed Nigeria. ME: Dey now play for Brazil. (Meanwhile match ends) WIFE: Baby, it has ended o. Nobody won. Will dey play penalty? ME: (Quiet). WIFE: Ok, dey are playing extra time. But don't dey know D players are tired? Is this Semi finals? ME: ( Picks my keys and escape from the house) Can't wait for world cup to end. Imagine!

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PART 2:

INTERJECTIONS

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PONDEI SYNDROME AND THE BALM OF GILEAD

July 2020

Corruption is the oil that lubricates Nigeria! Even though we are seeing the apogee of daredevil looting, in this regime; it's nothing new again! I have learnt to inoculate myself against such mental & shameless rapacity. Goodluck Jonathan was blamed for every single case of looting in his tenure. Whether it was at Federal, State or Local Government. Even in opposition states. Buhari is now absolved of blame in the Loot Eruptions rocking both his kitchen cabinet and official cabinet. The 'Pondei Syndrome' we witnessed yesterday was not the first, and will definitely not be the last. Looting is the collective gospel of Nigeria's political elites, but sharing is their 'Balm of Gilead'! As soon as a sharing formula is 'agreed', the national sea of Galilee will become calm again. The storm you see now on the sea of Galilee is because the Balm that calms was not applied adequately. Don't hold your breath. Olisa Akukwe

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SINGLE NARRATIVE SYNDROME!

July 2020

A white policeman murdered a black, middle aged man on the streets of US. Unanimously all Blacks, including those living outside US, rose in one voice to call US Racist. To call Whites, Racist. That was it! They are Racist, simple and short. No need to understand anything else. Only Whites are Racists. Ok. Back to Nigeria. Fulani, Hausa and some other Northern youths are found in buses, trucks, cars moving into Igbo states, we not only stop them whenever we can, we scream invasion! We scream war. We scream plot. We may be right, we may be wrong. Bottom line, we scream against our non-Igbo fellow countrymen coming into our abode. Despite allowing Igbos to freely enter. Even though there was a lockdown. Does this not qualify as Racism? Racist Igbos, if we go by our conclusion to the US incident? A Fulani Herdsman comes to your house at Aba to rent it. You refuse. Your secret reason being that he is a Fulani Herdsman. Is that not Racism, if we follow our response

254 Stopping Nonsense! to the US incident?

As a successful Igbo man, a Northern Herdsman that you don't even know his ethnicity, seeks your daughter's hand in marriage, you angrily abolish the relationship. Is that not Racism, by our response to the US incident? Few Igbo officers lead a bloody coup that changed our first independent government. Other ethnicities call it an Igbo (Racist) coup, you get upset. But is it not Racist, going by our labelling of the US incident? The Catholic Church appoints a Bishop for Mbaise Diocese, who is not from Mbaise. The Mbaise priests reject him and fight to finish. Until he is withdrawn! Is that not Racism, going by our labelling of Black experience in America?

You see, Single Narratives are a very dangerous thing. It blindfolds even the most educated. In all the instances I cited above, you will now read explanations, attempting to explain how "different" it was. There would suddenly be a reason, a good, even moral, reason why it was not Racism. The story behind the act or action will emerge.

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However when it involves US Whites, especially in Trump's America, it's a single narrative. No one thinks of or bothers if there is maybe a reason. A story. A malaise. No one tries to understand what may be the underlying impetus. It's simply Racism, inaugurated by hapless Mr Trump.

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LOOK IN THE MIRROR, PEOPLE. SINGLE NARRATIVE SYNDROME IS DANGEROUS.

July 2020

It's gratifying sometimes to be vindicated. I was vilified by some IPOB members, who live in Insults Avenue, when I first asked IPOB and OHANAEZE to talk to each other in 2017. Finally they have initiated that talk, after much bad blood and young lives were lost. #GoodStart. I had also asked in my Christmas message of 2015 that insults of other tribes can never bring Igbos any good. My advice was humbly engage Niger-Delta and Yorubas first, while maintaining mutual respect with northern ethnic nations. As usual, some of 'them' felt I was an obstacle to their IPOB quest. Now I learnt their Supreme Leader has ordered 'no more insults etc against Yorubas'. I am glad wisdom & decorum have joined the struggle. #GoodDevelopment The next is to divest the struggle of uncouth language, which is the bane of many IPOB members.

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THE CLOCK IS TICKING...

January 2018

Ndi Middle Belt of Nigeria, have you not yet realised it's a Civil War to take your land?!!! Are you still mourning, flying flags at half mast, moaning? Do you think it will ever stop, except those fertile lands are taken? Ndi Tiv, Idoma, Igbira, Birom, Junkun, Ngas, etc; when will you have your epiphany? Likewise Ndi Itsekiri, Yoruba, Urhobo, Bini and others. The Fulani Herdsmen keep killing, maiming, raping your people; and you don't know it's a declaration of war?

Nigeria Army remains the best and largest in the West Africa sub-region. How come they have found it utterly incapable of routing the killer Herdsmen? It's because the Order has NEVER been given!! Ask yourself Why? Is it not time to join Ndi Igbo and Ndi Ijaw to start the journey of self-determination?! Is it not time to start the peaceful, legal process of

258 Stopping Nonsense! autonomy De Facto, leading ultimately to Independence De Jure? Is it not time to overcome the Igbo phobia and completely redraw the power matrix of Nigeria? Is it not time to start thinking of Freedom and your Manifest Destiny? The clock is ticking....

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IN REMEMBRANCE!

May 2018

Today, I join all well-meaning humanists to remember the men, women & children whose candles of life were suddenly and gruesomely snuffed out in the dark, hostile storm of '67 to '70 in the former Biafran enclave.

Their innocent blood was the ink used to pen the 'no Victor, no vanquished' document, despite they were physically vanquished. We dare not allow their memories be vanquished too.

In the gentle valleys of Udi; the sleeping hills of Nsukka; the white sands of Port Harcourt; the jutting landscape of Afikpo; the bucolic bush paths of Ikot Ekpene; the narrow lanes of Onitsha ado n' idu; the rivers and streams of blood inadvertently fertilised a new Nigeria.

A Nigeria that has been harvesting tears and blood, ever since.

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May all the souls sent to untimely appointment with the hosts of heaven in that horror epoch find Peace-and help Nigeria find the murdered Peace.

#OZOEMENA. Olisa Akukwe Abuja, Nigeria.

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... STILL ON CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

October 2018

Nigerians discuss too much Politics, and too little economics! High oil prices is always a challenge for our local economy, though a boon to the govt. Like you rightly identified, it's not just in this regime. The reason is structural and constitutional. When the oil receipts increase due to positive price shock, the dollar receipts of CBN increase. Now these dollar receipts increase comes from the crude sales that accrued to FG. Now by Law, this receipts are to be SHARED to all tiers of government (federal, state, Local Government). So CBN is compelled to Monetize the Dollar receipts in Naira! This monetising in Naira inevitably increases the money supply in the economy, beyond CBN target. The monetised Forex, now in Naira is shared by the tiers of govt. Deposited in deposit banks. Naturally it begins to stoke inflation, which you know debases (read: devalues) the currency.

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So the CBN, already having an inflation target, and fighting to maintain some level of price stability, starts to tackle the "excess liquidity in the system"! It does this through a process called "sterilisation"! That is, it sells Treasury bills to deposit banks. These Banks pay with the new influx of 'excess liquidity' deposited by the public sector. In this way, the CBN can reduce the rate of inflationary pressures.

You can now notice that the CBN is fighting devaluation in a regime of INCREASED Forex receipt due to oil price positive shock! So appreciating currency is far from the scenario. This is a total anomaly caused by constitutional and structural folly!

Meanwhile, the tiers of govt will still get to spend their windfall! So their money must still enter the economy. But because of the treasuries sold by CBN, the banks have less cash reserves on which to create credits/deposits. So they reduce their credits to the real sector. This, altogether, is the main aim of CBN. Because if bank's credit to the economy increases, because of the increased monetised oil receipts, inflation may suddenly spike.

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This explains why CBN is always "mopping up excess liquidity"; while real economic players (households, SMEs, Industries etc) can't get liquidity from banks!

You can just go back & read old newspapers, even up to 1990, to see that this liquidity mopping up has been a constant. Without structural reforms, this cannot change. #Folly

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POT CALLING SAUCER BLACK!

October 2018

Before PDP primaries, the gist was that it will RAIN Naira and Dollars! After PDP primaries, the gist now is that it RAINED Dollars & Pounds!

The question is, since APC knew that vote buying, in Forex, will be gargantuan in Port Harcourt; WHY didn't undercover DSS, EFCC & NPF infiltrate the delegates, to arrest perpetrators? After all, vote buying is Corruption! Nonsense.

APC, party of insolence, corruption & propaganda! In Lagos, state exco organised gubernatorial primaries & announced result. Is that in APC constitution?

In Delta, leading Gubernatorial candidate was still searching for primaries venue, result came out.

In Imo, a sitting governor chose the election umpires &

265 Stopping Nonsense! they dutifully returned his son--in-law. Despite a restraining court order.

Please, APC, propaganda won't sell this time! Your only hope is RIGGING! But beware of Unintended Consequences!

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...TRENDING TALE

August 2018

I came home to meet the social media awash with pictures of Senator Akpabio and Gen Buhari,rtd. The news is that Akpabio is in London to see Buhari, for his already accomplished defection. I don't know Senator Akpabio closely, but many things make me doubt this trending tale. 1. Why are all these meetings being splashed in the media, if not for propaganda purposes? Akpabio's sudden decamping would have been more devastating, if it were true. Than all these macabre dance of subterfuge. 2. There are some impending, vital appropriations, like the Election Funding, in the senate. With the Saraki Recess, there is a clear danger of spanner in the works. Meanwhile, the APC Govt has currently alienated and burnt their bridge with Saraki.. Senator Akpabio remains the next most influential person to turn to, in the prevailing circumstances. I think a much broader negotiation is going on. 3. Senator Akpabio, I believe, knows the damage decamping under the canopy of 'safe-from-prosecution'

267 Stopping Nonsense! will do to his brand, nationally. The rumours that he wants to decamp, in order to hide his loots, have become contagious! Any decamping will be seen as confirmation. Unlike what many people think, I know in Ñigeria some corruption allegations are so odious, that they ruin Political careers. Ask Hon Erumelu, Gov Chimaroke, Hon Lawan Farouk etc. Senator Akpabio appears too wiry not to know these things. However, time will tell, if the Senate Minority (Majority) leader is running for cover!

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WAITING FOR THE CAT TO BARK!

August 2018

Nigeria, and Africa, lack the political pragmatism to move forward. In Nigeria, without Political Sovereignty for all Ethnic Nations AND a Custom/Economic Union; for the entire Nationalities, we will continue to strive IN VAIN! Same goes for entire Africa. 2019 will change... NOTHING! The Cat, any Cat, cannot bark.

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ARE YOU DONE TALKING?!

January 2018

Enough of running mouth!!! Seeing the gory pictures of those barbarically murdered Benue people sears the soul!!! Benue state chose to enthrone the historically aggressive Fulani in power. Now see what they get. The government that fell over itself in the hurry to declare IPOB a terrorist group, cannot even bring itself to mention "Fulani herdsmen attack" officially. Talkless of labelling them anything.

The best the Fulani led government can bring itself to say is Farmer-Herdsmen clashes!! Buhari cannot ever say sorry to Tiv or Benue people. You see the result of political naivety. It's time to stop running mouth or weeping! The entire SW, SS, SE and NC states; excluding Niger but including Taraba have the NUMERICAL STRENGTH to radically change the Constitution! Their Senators, HOR members and state House members should rise up to the challenge, once in a generation!

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OR FOREVER SHUT THEIR LEAKING MOUTH! This is the greatest opportunity for this nation to become a Federal Republic of Nigeria, not Fulani Republic of Nigeria. The Benue state APC Chairman should stop the useless tears!

These attacks are not just starting. He and other Tiv and Idoma leaders decided to hand the lives of their hapless citizens into their historical conquistadors. And now they weep? For who?!

Let the Southern Nigeria and Middle Belt, gird their loins and use that same compromised constitution to liberate themselves!

NO TIME FOR SELF PITY! My name is Olisa Akukwe...and am Fed Up!

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MY ANSWER TO A POST ON "POLITICAL ISLAM”

December 2017

!....and because of this I have decided to write on the Jerusalem Imbroglio! As one sided as most Religious Propaganda! Why distill only personal quotes of Isreali leaders without providing the context? Why didn't you provide quotes of Arab leaders in SIMILAR context? You accepted, from your history, that Israel lived and owned Samaria, Judea including Jerusalem, For MILLENNIA!

But because they were murdered, and scattered ultimately in 79AD, the land no longer belongs to them. So if they lost their land by force, it is lost forever! But If they gain same land by force, it's not theirs!! Abi? According to Islamic logic abi? You see the REAL mindset problem!

Did that your history also tell you that the current West Bank, called Occupied Territory, was the geographic location of the Tribes of Judea and Samaria?

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When and where in history has Palestine been a state? After the Jews were scattered, several conquerors matched on and ruled the middle East & Levant. NEVER did any of them give Palestine a state.

Rather the current Israel, Gaza, Westbank, Lebanon were treated as Greater Syria with Provincial statutes . The fundamental flaw of Religious Indoctrination is Fallacy under God's name. Don't get it twisted, Political Islam.

Wish you well. Olisa Akukwe

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MOVE FORWARD!

December 2017

As Nzuko Umunna embarks on "handshake across the Niger", let them remember that we need a Pan-Igbo Conference! Let Ndi Igbo of all shades of opinions sit down, and talk. Let the voices from the street corners, markets, schools, churches, offices, village squares, diaspora, Professions, Socio-cultural groups, separatist movements, all be heard. If Nigeria does not want a Sovereign Confab, we can start with intra-ethnic Confab; and move forward!

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START WORK IN EARNEST

December 2017

APGA should, as a matter of urgency, embark on a humble, reconciliation exercise across Igbo land. Especially in Abia, Imo, Enugu and Ebonyi states. The top most leaders of the party should drive that process. They should listen to what disaffected leaders of those states have to say. The party needs an internal healing and reformation. Leaders of all stratum in the party must be actively consulted. Ndi Igbo deserves a powerful regional party!!! We had NCNC in the 60s and NPP in the 80s. Nigeria is and remains an ethnic/religious rainforest. Parties with ethnic root are a must. The party may wish to have a National outlook/aspiration or a regional outlook. But it's root must be regional. That is the Nigerian reality. Let APGA leaders not waste this narrow opportunity again, like in 2015. Otherwise it's the death knell of the party-and insolent subjugation of Ndi Igbo politically. Let the work start in earnest.

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IT’S A NATURAL EXTENSION!

December 2017

Why wouldn't a religious fundamentalist wish to wear Hijab for call to Bar? Is Nigeria a Secular country? Member of OIC? State sponsor of Muslim and Christian spiritual pilgrimages? State builder of places of Religious worship? A nation that pays more in tithe than tax. Wearing Hijab for call to Bar is a natural extension!

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THE VULTURES ARE GATHERING

December 2017

The Sultan of Sokoto has spoken! According to him, stopping the Hijab activist from being called to bar was a "molestation!” The Hijab being a decent dressing, can be worn for call to Bar, despite the existing dress code. This is the view of his Eminence the Sultan! I am happy the Sultan is an officer in the Nigeria army.

Let the female Muslim soldiers wear Hijab for their Passing out Parades or Ceremonial Parades, first, before Sultan advises the Bar on their call to Bar dress code!! Nigerians be warned! What is happening is not isolated or outliers. Look around the world, and show me a nation that is half-christian, half-muslim or half-Hindu, half-muslim that survived! Hijab is only a symbolic bait. Nothing wrong in Hijab, decent dress that it is. Everything wrong in using it for Political Entrapment.

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BOYCOTT WILL NOT FORCE GOVERNMENT TO NEGOTIATE

November 2017

My brother Nnejichioke Ukachukwu Christopher, I once again beg to disagree. Remember when I wrote that depending on international laws and international community will NEVER actualise Biafra. Many Nnamdi Kanu worshippers openly maligned me. Yet events, locally & internationally, have proved me right.

Boycott of election will bring nothing to our agitation. Remember our boycott of 1964, it simply ended up giving the North the majority in federal parliament. Which they didn't have before then. And which they have never relinquished since then. Winning the levers of political power is a better and sure footed way to self rule, autonomy and eventual independence. The main reason it's being avoided is because it's hard work. Calling for inertia (boycott) is a very low hanging fruit and very easy to pluck. Getting a Homeland that is independent is HARD WORK.

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If the SS, SE, SW and Middle belt, probably excluding Niger, form a political alliance, power will be taken from the North.

And it's only then that meaningful progress can be made in amending the Constitution to accommodate Referendum. 24 states and 67% of NASS are needed for Amendment.

This is the work staring the agitators in face. But they don't want the hard & sure root. Boycott will not force government to negotiate. Time will again prove who is right.

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WHY CELEBRATE?

October 2017

When Ndi Igbo were celebrating Bukola Saraki for saying the Army labelling IPOB terrorists was unconstitutional. I called it a useless statement. I asked Why didn't Saraki influence his colleagues to include Referendum, among the ongoing constitutional amendment? I concluded that Ndi Igbo celebrating him for that useless statement is totally misguided. I have waited for some days now, to hear same Igbos criticise him for saying that the Senate supports the proscribing of IPOB by the federal government Nothing. Never believe that leaders of other ethnic nations love you, more than your own leaders...No matter how bad you think your leaders are.

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KA A KPAA YA AKPA!

July 2017

Vanguard reports that Nnamdi Kanu has denied calling for Boycott of Anambra elections! He has also denied setting deadline for the actualisation of Biafra. Where are those Chief Know-it-All-Insult-others? People were insulting many of us who have been writing for Igbo emancipation, because we repeatedly wrote that call for boycott was a complete mishap!! The next step, I think, should be a PAN-IGBO CONFAB!! If Ohanaeze claims IPOB can't speak for Igbos, then Ohanaeze can't speak for Igbos either! I personally think both IPOB and Ohanaeze can speak for ndi Igbo. But they should first speak to each other! After Ohanaeze -IPOB summit, we then engage in a PAN-IGBO Confab. Ka a kpaa ya akpa!

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CATEGORIES OF BIAFRAN SUPPORTERS

July 2017

I have discovered that there are two broad categories of Biafran supporters! Category 1: Are those who support Biafra first and foremost. Then support Nnamdi Kanu as a corollary of the Biafra struggle. This group of supporters see Nnamdi Kanu as an Igbo leader and a strident voice, in the struggle for self determination. They are comfortable in debating the Biafran question, without insults! They are objective and try to convince others of their view points. People like Ifeanyi Ifeanyichukwu Ihueze Ogbonna Ndulaka and Nnejichioke Ukachukwu Christopher belong to this noble group. Category 2: This group support Nnamdi Kanu first, and Biafra as a corollary! They worship Nnamdi Kanu and deify him. To them Mazi Kanu is god! He is omniscient. He is Biafra. This group cannot or do not marshal any coherent argument to buttress the case. They simply resort to

282 Stopping Nonsense! insults, badgering, browbeating, intimidation to force their bigoted view. They, despite their age, are very very very insulting and insolent! They are rapidly alienating many Igbo leaders of thought and action. They are sowing intellectual, social and political landmines for the Biafran struggle, unwittingly. Just keep your eyes open, you will soon distill them! They can't hold back. What a pity!

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MARCH OF FOLLY

September 2016

I had warned my close followers and the Nigerian government about everything happening now. My articles from August last year (2015) kept pointing out the ornate march of folly that was APC central government! This crisis is completely self inflicted. We are vindicated that Emir Sanusi, their own political avatar, has come out to corroborate the obvious truth.

The sad thing is that the self delusion of the ruling party will still continue. And beside that, the political class in Nigeria have learnt nothing! Primaries of major parties are still for sale. Politicians are generally still fractious, greedy and insular. The best minds and hearts still abandon politics for those with calloused conscience. The masses still prefer handouts than justice.

The Nigerian Dream remains "Wait your turn"! Laws remain minor hassles to be subverted at every turn. We still "know" that might is right in everything. Nigerians bought into change from snake charmers who have not changed. And cannot change. Peering

284 Stopping Nonsense! into the future, the train of gladiators that are grasping the rails of political leadership promises only one thing: more of the same!! Buhari has abandoned Change and rather asked us to change. He is half right. And it is the 2nd half. The first half of change we need is structural change. Economic and political structural change, to create a hard sewn context for the change in "us". But alas, it's not about to happen.

Things will only get worse; before it gets really worse! It's time for a new generation (in age and ideology) to begin the second Independence Struggle!

My name is Olisa Akukwe. And I still want to #StopNonsense

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THE DAMASCUS EXPERIENCE!

December 2015

Naira is 280 to 1 dollar. It's still going down! Where are all those "clueful" chain-ge agents? South west media has gone into coma! Chibok girls are now Chibok mothers. Inec now conducts election piece meal. Elrufai suddenly realises religious worshippers should not block federal roads. Fashola discovers GEJ constructed the highest kilometres of road of all past government put together. Amaechi now sees the train that GEJ inaugurated. Finance minister announces that our debt to GDP is one of the lowest in the world. Buhari spends 55 days traveling abroad and its no longer clueless junketing. We are still on the road to Damascus.....

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#DASUKIGATE: MAY IT NOT BE INCONCLUSIVE

December 2015

We live in inconclusive times. Dasuki and his men (no woman yet) are on the spot. Revelation after revelation has been tumbling down the hills of EFCC. Many decent Nigerians are, rightly, appalled. The embezzlement is not only humongous, but it appears callous. The depth and breadth of "yam sharing" is mind boggling. There is even the matter of 'statutory yam eating'. However I still keep it firmly in mind that nothing has been proven-yet!

What is forgotten in this entire macabre dance of shame is that all these money shared, allegedly, came from the national security ‘vote’! In other words, it was spent from the hitherto most opaque spending pipeline in Nigeria. Security Vote; the crown prince of embezzlement.

This brings me to why I am writing this piece. IF Gen Buhari rtd is sincere and honest in his fight against corruption, I challenge him to have the courage to also

287 Stopping Nonsense! probe the security votes of all the 36 state governments. Considering the size of security funds in Nigeria, after the Federal Government, the next in size is Lagos State. Followed by Akwa Ibom and River state. Can our dear president have the courage to initiate the probe of the security votes of Lagos, Akwa Ibom and Rivers and indeed all other states? What is good for fowl is also good for the tolotolo.

We have always known that security vote or funds has been the numero uno slush funds in Nigeria. Many people have tried to convince me that Dasuki and his people are being witch hunted. I don't buy it. But anything less than comprehensive investigation of security votes of the state governments, even if it is only from 2011, will be a confirmation of deceit. This thing should not be inconclusive!

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FAR FROM UHURU

December 2015

I wrote this 4 months ago. The handwriting was all over the place. Now, some economists are just realising. Naira continues its free fall. It's only Nigerians living abroad that can be philosophising our daily hardship. Telling us about "tightening", while swinging with stable or appreciating dollar, euro and pound! Mschew.

August 2015 I have read some celebratory news about naira appreciating against the dollar. And how it represents miraculous economic policy of the new government. I hate to burst some people's bubble. But let me present some recent data.

1. The naira lost 50 naira in the first 50 days of Buhari. It lost 25 Naira in 5 years of much vilified GEJ. 2. Our economy shrunk for the first time in 17 years, this quarter. Shrinking by over 500 million dollars. 3 The stock market shedded 1 trillion naira of value in Buhari's first 50 days.

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4 Disposable personal income shrank by 2 trillion Naira. From 16.9 trillion to 14.9 trillion Naira.

These indices may explain why some investors were shorting the naira and invariably the economy, and going long on dollar. As it stands now, those speculators still come out ahead. As the Naira is still devalued by about 30%, despite the recent appreciation. They can just roll over their short positions and wait for when CBN will lift the current Capital controls.

So Gen Buhari has his work cut out. Fundamental restructuring that will attract long term foreign capital is an urgent need. The Naira has to get to 160 in the parallel market to inflict massive losses on the suspected speculators. So its faaar from Uhuru!

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THE TRENDING LIST

October 2015

Nigerians like list eh! Chai. If the popular "list" circulating is anything to go by, then three things can be deduced. (I mean the list containing Ngige, Amaechi etc) 1. The Anti corruption fight will not be probes oriented. The government is rather going to try to manage the media. The "list" trending can not muster the moral courage and idealistic inspiration for probe based anti corruption fight. 2. Tinubu won! The list is more like what the Asiwaju can sanction than what Buhari would prefer. Too many party work horse. 3. APC is here to stay! This list is reward for party men. What better way to inspire more party work?

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GOOD MORNING CHUBA!

September 2015

My tribute to Wilberforce Chuba OkadIgbo, some 12 years ago. I still remember the emptiness that descended in my stomach when I heard the devastating news. I kept lamenting to Theo Anoliefo and Obinna Amaechina. I recall that he was heavily tear gassed in Kano by the Nigeria Police, a day prior to his demise. In a rally to support Buhari's quest for aso rock. The president, whom the police were working for then, was Gen Obasanjo rtd. Today, Obasanjo is with Buhari in New York. While OkadIgbo lies unremembered. Uncelebrated. But we shall always invoke history as the lamp post for the present. Oyi of Oyi Ekene M GI!

GOOD MORNING! CHUBA OKADIGBO is beyond it all. He is beyond the official deceits. He is beyond the frustrations. He is beyond the fears. He is beyond the propagandas. He is beyond the dumb judiciary. He is beyond the compromised arbiters. He is beyond the sabotage. He is beyond

292 Stopping Nonsense! kidnapped mandate. He is even beyond the power failures. Mankind’s most celebrated wordsmith called life a stage. OkadIgbo was true to that eternal dictum. He was the most accomplished politician. THESPIAN of the Fourth republic. Indeed he mounted the political stage decades before his contemporaries. We rose and fell with the waves of his political observation. He dramatized and melo-dramatized the peaks and vales of our harrowing political odyssey. He drew the stage lights of public opinion to the pot holes of political chicanery, like no other. He made us cry for a nation that has marginalised truth; weep for a society that has murdered justice; made us smile at the paediatric antics of adult officialdom; made us laugh at the absurdity of the march of folly in the robes of wisdom; made us exhale with the hope of change; made us sing the melody of a DAWN expected. He was our most durable POLITICAL THESPIAN. A POLITICAL DAYLIGHT.

OkadIgbo was our most potent political thought-smith. A socio-political alchemist. He was a master of turning pedestrian social conscience to Olympian political pragmatism, by moulding the thoughts of men. His

293 Stopping Nonsense! hand-shake across the Niger nearly pushed Abiola into Aso Rock and eventually dragged Obasanjo into presidential villa. His thoughts on marginalisation is still mid-wifing the necessary political changes in Nigeria. OkadIgbo gave us a HERO, an anti-HERO and an anti-Christ from the macabre drama in Anambra governor’s kidnap. His recently brokered handshake across the Benue may ultimately heal the wounds of the civil war, heal the scars of that carnage and bring a POPULAR leadership in Nigeria, the first time in 36 years. His thoughts On LEADERSHIP and POWER will ever remain the maternity of true leaders.

Chuba (Yes, he is that familiar to Nigerians, even barrow pushers and day labourers) has left the stage of life. He left the stage of life, the stage of politics, the stage of social conscientism, the stage of political pragmatism like the THESPIAN that he was. He left the stage with the cameras still rolling, the drums still thumping softly, the lights dimmed but shinning, the crowds exhausted with the sheer intensity of the performance and yet longing, gasping for more. Chuba left the stage with the applause still rising!

But it is a MORNING yet on Chuba’s legacies. Whereas

294 Stopping Nonsense! the legacies of many present power-holders are at mid- night. In our heart, dawn is just breaking on Chuba’s legacies. The soft and gentle breeze of dawn is just caressing our memories of Chuba’s monuments of posterity. GOOD MORNING CHUBA. The Ogbu na-eche Ndo will never wilt! Olisa Akukwe 27 sept 2003.

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1ST OCTOBER...

September 2015

As 1st October 2015 approaches, my thoughts are sorrowfully on this date, 39 years ago. 1st October 1966 was the day of the grimmest massacre in Nigeria, prior to the civil war. Tens of thousands of Igbos were brutally murdered in Kano Airport and Central railway station as they were attempting to leave the city. It was the saddest day of Igbo existence before the war. And indeed Nigeria's bloodiest day in peace time. It is most unfortunate and appalling that 39 years after, none of the known perpetrators have ever been tried! Talk less of convicted. Nigeria must come to terms with her sordid past if she is to walk into the sunshine of greatness. The prodigal nation must come home to Truth for Reconciliation. Ndi Igbo still mourns. The Kano Massacre of Oct 1 1966! Remember them and their families in your prayers.

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BILIE VS IPOB. O GINI NA ESE?

September 2015

I have been disconcerted by the bad blood that is developing between BILIE human rights and the INDIGENOUS people of Biafra. This stems from their difference in approach in tackling the BIAFRAN QUESTION. BILIE believes and applies the legalistic method. They are in court in Owerri, seeking to use the right of self- determination, to compel the Nigerian state to accept a referendum. IPOB is using revolutionary methods, with a rather effective insurgent media tactics, to organize and push same matter. This difference in approach is creating needless friction. With occasional vituperative outbursts. My take is, both should follow whatever method they feel is right. Provided the law is not wantonly broken. BILIE thinks IPOB is inciting Igbo youths to war. I don’t think so. But IPOB needs to look into this allegation, and know if it may need to reinvent its style, if not the substance. We don’t want another war.

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What Ndi Igbo wants is JUSTICE & EQUAL OPPORTUNITY. Nothing else. It is the continual denial of this that makes Biafra attractive. Millions of Igbos believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can never get justice and level playing ground in Nigeria. BILIE & IPOB should know that Ndi Igbo appreciates them. They should know that "uzo esi eje onitsha e rika"! They should allow each to thrive. "Onye ji eze a ri enu ma osisi na enu inu!”

I can only add that we need a working, active, Igbo party. A political party plays many roles, amongst which is organizing and mobilizing. We need the party that is pro Igbo. Pro-Igbo is not anti-Nigeria. Can APGA rise up to this challenge? Pro-Igbo in all ramifications. Including telling ndi Igbo painful truths. I will elaborate on this in a later epistle.

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CENSUS!

September 2015

It was no hidden fact that Chief Festus Odimegwu was removed from National Population Commission by, amongst others, the vehement opposition by northern leaders led by Kwankwaso. It is even more revealing that Nigeria's census does not capture ethnicity and tribes. In a multi-ethnic, multi- nation country, this is rather suspicious. Yet affirmative actions based on geographic regions are codified in our laws. WHO is afraid of knowing the actual population of different ethnic nationalities in Nigeria? I went to CIA fact book to check if the size of Nigeria's ethnic nationalities maybe captured. Since Nigeria does not want to capture it. CIA broke down the major ethnic nations thus YORUBA- 21% HAUSA-21% IGBO-18% FULANI-11% IJAW-10%. But I challenge the head of Service, the chief of army

299 Stopping Nonsense! staff, the IG of police, the administrator of custom, the CJN, the presidency etc; to publish all past and present top echelons of their institutions. Let Nigerians check if their percentage reflects the size of the different ethnic nationalities in Nigeria. We must include the ethnic nationalities in the next census. Legislators from the south must insist on this. And the next census should employ advanced biometrics. We must know how much we really are, and how the population is distributed.

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NDI IGBO, IKUKU KUO, AFU IKE OKUKU!

September 2015

We have had eminent men champion our cause in yore years. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zach Obi, M.I Okpara, Mbonu Ojike, Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Akanu Ibiam, Daddy Onyeama, Nwafor Orizu, Mbazuluike Amaechi, C.C. Onoh, Prof Ikejiani, etc. These were the leaders that were from pre-world war generation. They provided solid leadership, while not always agreeing. But they were believers. They were succeeded by leaders of the mid-colonial generation. Names like Alex Ekwueme, Chuba OkadIgbo, Igwe Abangwu, Austin Ezenwa, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, Sir Joe Nwankwu, Chief A.C. Okose, Dee Sam Mbakwe, Jim Nwobodo, Anaezi Okoro, Chinua Achebe, T.C. ChIgbo, F.C Ogbalu, Roy Umenyi, T.I Ume-ezeoke, C.Moore Obioha, Eze Des Ogugua, Chief Ilodibe, Madam Rangers etc. These leaders recreated Igbo land after the Civil war.

The independence generation have been contributing

301 Stopping Nonsense! their fair share of leadership since the 4th republic. Names like Peter Obi, Charlie Ugwu, Ugochukwu Agbala, Ken Nnamani, Willie Obiano, Hon Ugwuanyi, Rocha's Okorocha, Fr Mbaka, Annie Okonkwo, Linda Ikpeazu, Chris Anyanwu, Stella Oduah, etc. This generation are more subsumed in the Nigerian project, than Igbo project. But they have never the less provided leadership. My call goes out to the post-civil war generation. Ebe ka unu no? Great spirits also animate this generation. Bold and Brilliant. But we need them to come together irrespective of party or other inclinations. I think of Comrade Tony Nwoye, Afam Osigwe, Obinna Amaechina, Ifeanyi Ibezim, Osita Chidoka, Ernest Nwoye, Ifeanyi Ndulaka, Nnamdi Okose, Nigga Raw, Maduka MPK, Ikenna Ubadigha, Chinedu Nwodo, Love day Anyim snr, Linda Ikeji, Laila Ijeoma, etc. When will you guys harken to the call of your people? All these greatness must leave a political trade mark on Igbo land. Our heart yearns for the coming together of the leaders in this generation. Those mentioned, and many more not mentioned. Ebe kuo Dike! The parliament of heroes beckon. Izu Dike!! May the call not come back as hollow, bellowing, echoes in Jesus name.

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WHY THE NORTH MADE OBASANJO PRESIDENT IN 1999.

September 2015

How can an editorial of one of the longest surviving newspaper in Nigeria mix up historical facts? First, NPN did not win 12 states. NPN won 7 states. UPN won 6, NPP won 3, GNPP won 2 and PRP won 1. NPN did not win 12 states in 1979. The issue of 12 states came up because of the constitutional requirement of winning 25% in 2/3 of the 19 states. This requirement was NOT met by Shagari's NPN. Hence the Supreme Court 'rigged' judgement of ruling that 2/3 of 19 state was 12 and 2/3 states. NEVER in the history of jurisprudence has a state been treated as a fraction. To further confirm the court’s wilful amputation of justice, the lords of the wig ruled that the judgement CANNOT serve as precedence, ever!! Awolowo should have been our president in '79 and Nigeria would have been vastly better today.

To refresh some memories, on August 11, 1979 when

303 Stopping Nonsense! that election was held, the military dictatorship of Obasanjo ordered a blanket arrest of UPN party agents in all the northern states, on the election day. Also on the eve of the election, Aug 10, 1979, Obasanjo did a nationwide broadcast telling Nigerians that "...the best candidate will likely not win"! Confirming the rigging intentions.

Also the Presidential election tribunal set up by Obasanjo for the election was headed by Justice B.O. Kazeem, the man who was the leading counsel for government during their trumped up trial of Awolowo in 1962, before sending Awo to jail. Of course, as president of the election tribunal in 1979, Justice Kazeem ruled against Awo's petition. Obasanjo also surreptitiously changed the CJ of the nation on the 21 of August 1979, A DAY after Awo filed his appeal. Fatai Williams was appointed CJ of the Nigeria. A man who was a publicly acknowledged antagonist of Awo and a sympathiser of Akintola during the 1st republic; like the father of Femi Fani Kayode. These are some of the facts of how Obasanjo went full throttle to stop Awo's presidency. I wish Nigerians can really become students of their

304 Stopping Nonsense! nation’s history. We still await our political John the Baptist. A messiah is not even in the agenda, yet!

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RESPONSE TO A YORUBA FRIEND

September 2015

Yemmy, There was provision for run-off in the '79 constitution. You are very correct about the forces arrayed against Awolowo. You were also right to wonder how Igbos felt about Awo in 1979 elections. WE (I’m Igbo) generally detested him. Despite that, many Igbos were enlightened enough to know that he was our nation's brightest hope for development. I have always and still think that Awo represents the most sublime in the pantheon of leaders that Nigeria has produced. If there had been a run-off in 1979, considering the sentiments on ground, my OPINION is that Awo would have won. NPP of Zik would have delivered Anambra, Imo and Plateau that they won, to Shagari. Awo would have won Gongola and Borno won by GNPP; as well as Kano won by PRP. Waziri of GNPP will never have joined an alliance that included the Great Zik because Zik literally snatched NPP from Waziri. Fact. Aminu Kano's PRP was also more aligned with Awo in

306 Stopping Nonsense! personal principles and ideology. More importantly Gongola, Borno and Kano had almost double the votes of Anambra, Imo and Plateau in that election. On the other issue of how majority of Igbos felt about Awo, no ethnic nationality will easily forget or even forgive a man that orchestrated a policy that killed their children, SLOWLY. Awo openly proclaimed this policy. He never denied it. Imagine how Yorubas would have felt generally if Zik had orchestrated such policies against Yoruba children, in their most vulnerable period. Awo probably had some deep seated remorse for that ugly war policy, knowing his profound spirituality. He also tried to make amends later, no matter how tentative. He chose an Igbo man as his running mate.

I also do not think that Awo hated the ordinary Igbo man or any common man for that matter. He only had very strong personal contempt for some Igbo leaders of his time. Especially for Azikiwe and his political acolytes. Which was reciprocated. However I think it’s time Ndi Igbo collectively forgive the memories of Awo. Awo remains the archetype of that great leader we are looking for. Tragically, the greatest traitors of Awolowo have been

307 Stopping Nonsense! his own people. Akintola, Obasanjo, Fatai Williams, Fani-Kayode, Abiola, Akinjide these are all the greatest enemies Awo had. And they always worked with the Hausa-Fulani establishment. History will never forgive Obasanjo! Ndi Igbo must forgive, but we cannot forget.

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TERRORISM DYNAMICS

September 2015

I would like to put some things in perspective. El-Zakzaky's group that thrives in Zaria is Shitte. Shitte is far more sophisticated than Sunni when it comes to issues of Political terrorism. They are protesting in solidarity with Hamas because they feel (and have) more affinity with HAMAS than other Nigerian Muslim and Christian citizens. Look at some facts: 1. HAMAS is a shitte terrorist group sponsored by Iran and controlling Gaza. 2. HITZBOLLAH is a shitte terrorist group sponsored by Iran and controlling Lebanon. 3. Alawites clan is a shitte clan controlling Syria (Assad dynasty) and supported by Iran. Shitte are far more sophisticated in using political structures that have terrorist nucleus to control regions and countries. They organize control and win their regions city by city! They always have one spiritual head, even if there are several Ayotallahs. It is not unlikely that this 'protest' was sponsored by Iran. You can now understand why they will not protest killings

309 Stopping Nonsense! and abductions of fellow citizen or attacks on Buhari and Sheik Bauchi few years back, but will protest Gaza conflict. Talk of where your bread is buttered. What we should learn from this is that the very soul of Northern Nigeria, and indeed Nigeria is up for grabs. The sunni terrorists like Boko Haram, Al Queda etc are basically 'hit and run' terrorists. They bomb and die. Or bomb and scamper. Hoping simply to destroy, devastate and lay desolate. Shitte, on the other hand, systematically work to gain control of all apparatus of power discreetly, city block by city block. Gain control of hearts (through religion) and resources (thrugh arms & brigandry). Then unleash a local fiefdom of fear. From which you can never regain those territories again. Ever! Iran, Gaza and Lebanon are ever present examples. One irony though, they detest Sunni and Wahabist Muslims. Maybe they can be a bulwark against BH in Zaria and other places they are beginning to "control".

We don’t know what we are facing yet. Our problems are getting far deeper than PDP/APC or Ohanaeze/Arewa.

Happy Sunday.

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KINDERGARTEN SOCIETY

September 2015

I have read, with some rather amused perplexity, the Buhari and Osibanjo's asset declaration. First, I don’t think it’s a "declaration". It is at best an official version of a cabinet gossip. We await the declaration, published in national and social media. Next, what is the purpose of saying "two mud houses"? The other listed 5 houses, why didn’t they mention their construction materials? Say mud, marble, gold, cedar etc. Since they are mentioning the building materials. Further, WHAT is the value of the houses and shares mentioned? I also remember we were told Buhari had no house in Abuja or outside Daura. What happened? HOW many cars??? What is this about saying the number of cars? How many? He has 30M cash in the bank!! The above average Nigerian has only 18K cash in bank!!! So let us be spared this bromide of a poor general. His bank balance is 1600 times higher than on average Nigerian. Now let all remember that this is a man that Nigerian government has taken care of all his needs and care, for

311 Stopping Nonsense! the past 47 years. He has not faced the common challenges of hunger, house rent, school fees, hospital bills, etc. Like the common man. So Garuba Shehu, spare me this sleight of hand. We are no kindergarten society!

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LET MERIT RING!

August 2015

Following the recurrent predilection of Gen M. Buhari to find "competent" people from the north of the Niger only, is it not time for a consummate, eloquent, charismatic and brilliant lawmaker to initiate the repeal of that obnoxious and retrogressive noose in the constitution? I mean the Federal Character! Since Buhari has downgraded it, De facto. It's time to make it De jure. Let us finally Kick out Federal Character! In the Civil service. In the Armed forces. In university admission. In the police. In our life. Let merit ringgggg! Next week, I will publish on this wall "MY FEAR...". Keep a date.

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CBN IS THE PROBLEM, NOT IMPORTERS.

August 2015

It is not the tooth picks and wheel barrow purchase that has made our naira to lose 50 naira in 50 days. Far from it. It is the decline in our terms of trade necessitated by the decline in the price of our major forex earner, oil! Economics 101. That decline was rapid but not unpredictable. We have been living beyond our means for too long on the rather favourable terms of trade that was not under our control. When oil boomed under Obasanjo, Soludo attempted to prevent the naira from appreciating by doing "sterilisation"! That was why the foreign reserve ballooned. But consequently domestic money supply exploded, and with the continual supply shock in the real economy, the money flowed into financial assets leading to financial assets inflation which we saw as share price acceleration (before the bust) and land price skyrocketing. When the oil shock started last year, it hit us hard. Even Sanusi as CBN governor did not adequately prepare for

314 Stopping Nonsense! this outcome. Like was mentioned, we spend over 10 billion dollars to fund fuel import. That is 3 times the amount spent on the sundry things targeted by CBN Governor. So why didn't he ban funding fuel import and ask them to source privately? After all government even built the means of refining in Nigeria, using our collective wealth. It's just a case of targeting low hanging fruits or defenceless or influence-less small importers (mainly Igbo traders).

I do not buy into depreciation now, since they did not allow Naira to appreciate in the good days. Currency can't have only assymetric float. Naira should be supported. But fundamental structural reforms should be fast tracked.

Fast track stolen funds repatriation. That will have a positive effect on the Naira position because the funds are huge. Totally reform the custom practice and ports operation. Still very opaque. Creates too many black market millionaires.

Create a timeline for domestic refining! Get power working by licencing micro-turbines operators. This can create over 300 small power entrepreneurs. This is

315 Stopping Nonsense! the Nigerian way. Look at what entrepreneurs have done in rental accommodation, schooling, retailing etc.

This is the Nigerian way. Unleash the latent entrepreneurial powers of Nigerians in all sectors. Not just this crony capitalism of the Dangotes.

Meanwhile lending rates are high because of CBN policies. CRR was 60% as at last week. Interbank rates was 40% last week. Came down to 15% this business week. Still very high. And rather volatile. All these are among the highest financial cost in the world!! If capital was cheap, and power stable, I guarantee you that Nigerians won't import tooth picks. It will be made here.

CBN is the problem, not importers!

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THERE THEY GO AGAIN!

August 2015

About 750 billion naira was realised in VAT, in 2013. Over 75% of this funds were raised from southern Nigeria! And only 10% is directly accruable to the state that generate the VAT. 90% is transferred to federation account for "sharing!”

And good chunk of this VAT comes from taxing alcohol consumption, which is banned in sharia states. Yet they share in this revenue. If it’s doubled, as they plan, then it may generate 1.4 trillion naira on the least. Siphoned from the long suffering southern states.

We urgently need to revisit the revenue formula. Derivation has to be nothing less than 50%.

It was under Yakubu Gowon and eventually Murtala Mohammed that Derivation was removed from the revenue formula. It was Dina committee that set off this evil rampant that is killing merit and hard work.

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It is important to remind hard thinking folks that the recommendations of Dina committee was rejected by Awolowo and all the state finance commissioners in Nigeria, then. Yet it was implemented by Gowon. Why? From there they gradually deleted derivation from the sharing formula. Till recent salutary inclusion of mere 13% for oil. And none for VAT.

If we want Change, it must be fundamental and radical! This our formula works nowhere in the world! No WHERE!

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NOTHING WRONG IN BORROWING BRILLIANCE!

August 2015

Importing "know how" through foreign R&D is how ALL countries build domestic capability. Likewise importing capital. The problem is more in importing goods and services, not know how. This was what US did in the industrial revolution, importing the steam power know how from England and capital from Germany. China did it in current mileu by attracting foreign companies to do R&D and outsource production to China. From there they learnt by backward integration. Tecno, Infinix etc piggy backed on Iphones R&D. So I thought deeply about this, before suggesting. It is what has worked for the past 300 years. And it is still working. Nothing wrong in borrowing brilliance. Awolowo once told Mike Omeloye, a journalist, that as Nigeria's president, he would STEAL foreign technologies, if he can, to leap frog Nigeria. Awolowo was not a trivial talker or thinker. Wish you well.

319 NKE A BU NKE ANYI November 2013

During the next gubernatorial election in Kaduna, Victor Umeh should go as APGA party leader to supervise or is it monitor the elections. Let's see how it will go down. Ndi Anambra have shown that they have identity. We do not take orders from another state. We congratulate Chris Ngige for his courage, but we remember 'There was a Country'. We remember painfully. After the National conference, after we have all bared our pains, accepted our mistakes, agreed on a new road map, then we may start over again. For now, we have spoken without equanimity. Anambra is APGA! Just as Lagos is ACN ( APC?). When Lagos goes APGA, Anambra will go APC (ACN?). APGA disappointed ndi Anambra by their under- handling of Soludo, but since Soludo accepted in good faith, so did Ndi Anambra. Tony Nwoye's phenomenal rise has also shown that if the new leaders under-perform, the post-civil war generation will sweep them off in a political tsunami. But Anambra will never take orders from ndi mba ozo. Anyi adiro acho okwu!

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Olisaemeka Akukwe

Olisaemeka Francis Akukwe was a man of many parts who bestrode these parts with excellence. A Medical Imaging Scientist, Olisaemeka was also a consummate historian and a strong voice in the political and economic development of his country.

Born on the 21st of February 1973 to the family of Ichie John Obide Akukwe and Mrs. Regina Onyebuchi Akukwe. Olisaemeka was the fifth of seven children. His father, the traditional Prime Minister of Eziowelle (Onowu Eziowelle) a renowned South Eastern Politician, is a disciplinarian. Some of this discipline could be seen in the way Olisemeka viewed the world and understood life. At birth, he was named Olisaemeka, as a sort of declaration by his father that the Almighty God deserved all the thanks for the gift of life.

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Olisaemeka was baptized and christened Francis after St. Francis of Assisi, the Saint known for his affinity with nature and his humility. Perhaps, his baptismal name was also a tribute to his Uncle and Catholic priest, the Late Monsignor Dr. Francis Akukwe. The Catholic priest and acclaimed academic in the field of sociology was to influence Olisa’s passion for social engineering and history. Olisaemeka would often speak of how he was always lost beneath the mountains of books in Monsignor’s library. Incidentally, when Monsignor Akukwe passed on, Olisaemeka inherited most of his books.

Olisaemeka attended St. Vincent de Paul Nursery School Enugu; Zik Avenue Primary School, Enugu; Uwani Secondary School, Enugu and Christ the King College Onitsha. Moving from serene Enugu to the bustling city of Onitsha for his senior secondary school must have been challenging for Olisaemeka. But he took this in his stride. His school mates at the Christ the King College speak of his academic brilliance, his rare ability to understand issues with a depth beyond his years and his ability to bring happiness and laughter even when he was suffering.

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He took the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examinations in 1991 marking the end of his Secondary schooling. In 1992, he was admitted to study Medical Radiography at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

In the University, his gift of leadership shone as he became one of the rallying figures in students’ union politics. His understanding of the dynamics of politics was so astute that some candidates who wanted to lead the students’ union would first ask him whether it was okay to run. With a deep sense of how leadership should be used to bring about social change, he served in students’ union committees, often spurring union governments to excellence. He was also a member of the Rotaract Club.

In 1999, Olisaemeka graduated with honors, with a degree in Medical Radiography and Radiological Science. He also obtained a Master of Science degree in MRI at the Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge United Kingdom in 2014. He attended numerous professional development courses including at Harvard Medical School and numerous courses approved by the College of Radiographers in the United Kingdom, London Graduate School; American Society

323 Stopping Nonsense! of Radiologic Technologists; Fetal Medicine Foundation UK; Cardio Village US; American Registry of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists (ARMRIT), MedScape Education; International Center for Postgraduate Medical Education (ICPME) amongst others. His scientific research include, Extra-Hepatic Manifestation of Liver Diseases (1997), Evaluation of the Pituitary Gland size Amongst Nigerians (1997) and Standard of Breast MRI Practice among MRI Radiographers in Nigeria (2014).

Olisaemeka was a member of the Radiographers Registration Board of Nigeria (RRBN), the Medical Imaging Society of Nigeria (MISON), the British Society of Echocardiography, Canadian Society of Echocardiography, the College and Society of Radiographers, UK, and the American Society of Radiologic Technologists. Olisaemeka’s career in medical imaging spanned various organizations like Tayodek Medical Diagnostics Center, Sauki Diagnostic Center, Ultimate Diagnostic Center and Kings Care Hospital all in Abuja. Wherever Olisaemeka worked, he brought his deep sense of responsibility, his brilliance in the craft and care for the patients.

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Olisaemeka also influenced deeply the field of Radiography in Nigeria. He was co-founder of the Medical Imaging Society of Nigeria (MISON) and served as Secretary and Member of the Board of Trustees of this professional body till his passing. It is interesting to note that the formation of this body has been one of the most positive hallmarks in the career of medical imaging scientists in Nigeria. The Society finally gave them a voice and a professional pedestal in Nigeria.

Olisaemeka was a voracious reader and student of history, politics and economics. He not only read these things for knowledge sake but put them in practice. He co-founded Freedom Alliance, a think tank which not only discussed socio-economic problems but proffered workable solutions. Some of these solutions were sent to the National Assembly. He espoused an ideology which mixed capitalism and socialism within the Nigerian context. This was sometimes fondly called Olisanomics. His ideas on public housing led to the formation of Bonanza Shelters Limited.

Olisaemeka was a public commentator to be reckoned with and had many followers. He was an intellectual

325 Stopping Nonsense! conscience in a country slowly disintegrating. While Olisaemeka believed that Nigeria could work together, he also believed in the independence of regions and a restructured Nigeria. His visionary essays have been published in Newspapers and on various social media platforms, and have been cited in reputable journals and works including the Central Bank of Nigeria Journal. His essays and articles continue to shine a light to the future that Africa could have if it only dared.

Olisaemeka had many opportunities to work and live abroad where life was easier and his job better remunerated. Still, he believed that it was necessary that Africa’s intelligentsia had a duty to develop her from the inside. This is a sacrifice he made, and one he lived proudly. He was an Ozo Chieftain in his home town Eziowelle with the title of OZO ONONIKPOAKU.

Olisaemeka was a pragmatic idealist, an articulate genius, a man of integrity, a caring son, a loving brother, an amazing husband, a true friend. He was kind, generous, jovial, peace loving and an overall excellent human being. He made an impressive positive impact on all who encountered him.

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Olisaemeka married the love of his life Mrs. Vivian Nnenna Akukwe, on July 03, 2012. About a year later, he was diagnosed with Chronic Renal Disease. Despite the burden and complications of the diagnosis, Olisaemeka lived a normal life devoid of self-pity and inconvenience to others till his death on March 15, 2021. Though Olisaemeka lived all his life with the burden of sickle cell anemia, he did not let this fact deter him from living a heroic life of service to others.

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