By Suyi Ayodele

After settling KWAM 1 with ambassadorial epaulettes, it appears that the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) President, MC Oluomo, is next to receive Baba’s blessings. With the approval of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) at its meeting last week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be building six motor parks (aka bus terminals) across the country.

Our President is a personality prone to hilarious performances. He has introduced another phony enterprise into the business of state with the planned ‘Modern Bus Terminals’ in the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. Please pay attention to the qualifier, ‘modern’ because what follows is pure superlative! When the government is deliberate in its dictions, using adjectives to qualify its head words, you should know that it has something up its sleeves.

The motor parks are evenly distributed this time around. The ‘dot on the map’ zone got its own fair share. There is no ojooro, no magomago, no wuruwuru! The principle of ‘Federal Character’ is at its best element. There will be one bus terminal in Kano. That will take care of the seven states in the North-West. One will be in Gombe for the six states of the North-East. The Confluence Town, Lokoja, Kogi State will have one for the entire people of the North-Central zone.

Down South, Abeokuta, Ogun State, will have one for all the children of Oduduwa in the South-West. The Ndigbo will all travel to the commercial city of Onitsha, Anambra State, to enjoy the proposed state-of-the-art bus terminal. The oil-rich Niger Delta is taken care of, also. Their motor park is going to be tucked in the belly of Ewu in Esan Central Local Government Area of Edo State.

Never mind the distance; never bother about the 9.3 hours travelling hours between Sokoto and Kano; a mere 537-kilometre distance. The government has the magic wand to bridge the gap and extend the dividends of the bus terminals to everybody. Fela Anikulapo Kuti called it “government magic”! This government works wonders! Ógbenután!

Now the main gist. Each motor park, the government said, would cost N23.6 billion. Please don’t shout! Yes, the bus terminals will be built with bricks and mortar. It will merely cost the country an arm, a leg and several pints of blood. That is not too much of a pain to inflict by a government that is far away from reality!

But the beauty of it all is that the bus terminals will be beautifully decorated and equipped with world-class facilities and equipment. When completed, Angels would no longer want to fly. Our Celestial brethren will travel our roads with us. That itself gives us peace of mind. Nothing can be safer than to be in the same bus with the Angels, the Malaikas and the principalities in high places! We are lucky folks, aren’t we?

No sarcasm is intended. Methinks that every Nigerian that will commence and terminate his or her journey at the bus terminals (please add modern), is guaranteed of his or her safety. How? Aso Rock Villa will be able to monitor every vehicle that leaves each of the bus terminals (or is it bus stop sef?). I put my shirt on it! It is a sure banker! A N23.6 billion bus terminal must have security gadgets that should be able to monitor our present, our progress and our future! If it is otherwise, then it is a waste of resources, and President Tinubu blocks wastages!

Nigeria is an ojúmó kan, àrà kan (one day, one stunt) country. We don’t run out of damfool ideas here. The only thing in short supply is a leadership with depth. A complacent followership equally promotes inept leadership. We are gradually gravitating towards the precipice of a failed nation. Many people believe we are already one!

President Tinubu may end up the luckiest president by the time he completes his tour of duty. He is one president who treats the country like his personal estate. And he gets away with it, all the time. Nobody questions him, nobody interrogates his policies. Nobody has the temerity to say: “Baba Seyi, you are not fair to us.”

In Aso Rock Villa, where he lives at our expense, Tinubu marks off the number of the strokes he has administered to our backs. Then, he takes his champagne. Or is it freshly tapped palm wine? He asks the boys to go back to procure more canes for future flogging. We are completely pummelled! How does he do that; how does he achieve that total appropriation of the people’s resilience? 

We simply swallow whatever pill the President forces down our throats. We agonise like the proverbial woman being pleasured by a man with a big phallus.  And nothing more. She merely waits in palpable trepidation for the next round of tortuous grinding.

Nigerians have been conditioned to be perpetually complacent by a government that trades in poverty and profits by inflicting pain!  We blech. We stretch. We look for any available pillow to rest our weary heads. Then we wait for the next round of dosage. Our ruiners of this epoch are not just mean, wicked and audacious; they are inorganic, pathologically cold-blooded!

That the Tinubu administration is heavily transactional is no longer ‘a topic for future symposium’ (apologies to Fela). That itself is not the real problem, not the real bad case, here. The brazen way the administration goes about its Mr-Giwa-is-a-trader activities is the most irritating. The citizenry appears completely battered such that not a whimper is heard from them anytime the government comes up with its nothing-go-happen policies.

By the approval given by the FEC last Wednesday, the six motor parks, colourfully presented to us as “Modern Bus Terminals’, will be built for the sum of N142,028,576,008.17. Nigeria’s FEC is the gathering of all ministers and any appointee of cabinet rank. Sa’idu Ahmed Alkali, the Minister of Transportation, told us FEC approved the project.

By simple arithmetic formula of division, the cost of each terminal is N23.6 billion! That will depend on the inflation rate between when the contract is awarded and when it is executed. If prices of goods and services go up the way they do daily in Nigeria, there will be room for contract variation. So, by the time the terminals are ready, the cost might have gone up.

When Alkali announced the ‘deal’, my mind raced to my secondary school days when we were taught Types of Legislative Power. Did our Government subject teachers misinform or miseducate us by saying that building a motor park is a function listed in the Residual Legislative List? Were they wrong to have said that construction, running and the maintenance of motor parks or ‘modern bus terminals’ are the responsibilities of the third tier of government, the local government? Do I simply say this “is confusing me?”

The minister, a former senator, while justifying this put-on, attributed “crimes, road accidents and illegal arms proliferation” to the lack of major bus terminals in the country. How can a man be phony and funny at the same time? How do we situate this type of reasoning: “because there are no bus terminals to address the interests of millions of Nigerian commuters, as a result, we have a lot of crime, road traffic accidents, and proliferation of arms and ammunition on our highways?”

What logic! In Alkali’s reasoning and Tinubu’s approval, once these bus terminals are built, all the bandits, kidnappers and other felons operating all over Nigeria will have no way to move their weapons? The Kano bus terminal designated for the North-West for instance, would ensure that bandits in Kaduna, Kebbi, Jigawa, Sokoto, Katsina and Zamfara are shut out of arms and ammunition supply? What exactly is lacking in this administration?

How would a government think that in 2025, a bus terminal built in Abeokuta, Ogun State capital, would solve the road transportation problems of the remaining states in the South-West? Couldn’t we have channelled the N142,028,576,008.17 to the East-West Road that has remained in a state of interminable construction?

How does one explain that of all the problems confronting us as a nation, the priority of this administration is the construction of “modern bus terminals” in the six geo-political zones of the country? How do we tell generations to come that at a time Nigeria was battling with insurgency and banditry in the North and kidnapping, farmers cum herders’ clash in the South, the Federal Government was busy constructing motor parks, a project that local government councils could handle? Why this lack of compunction by this government of promised but undelivered ‘hope’?

In China, there is a bridge that is 168.8 kilometres long. The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge is rated as the world’s longest bridge, spanning 164 kilometres! Constructed between April 18, 2006, and November 15, 2010, the bridge cost the Chinese Government $8.6 billion US dollars. That, in our currency, is a whopping N13.175 trillion.

Back here in Nigeria, we have our darling 3rd Mainland Bridge built by the Alhaji Shehu Shagari and General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) administrations in two phases between 1980 and 1990. The span of the 3rd Mainland Bridge is 11.8 kilometres. And to repair the bridge, this administration said it would cost us N3.6 trillion! In mathematical terms, the cost of repairs on the 3rd Mainland Bridge is one-third the cost of the construction of Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge.

To know who we are and what the government thinks we are, we must understand that the Chinese Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge is 14 times longer than our 3rd Mainland Bridge! If Fela were to be here today, he would simply sing: arrangee na be that o. And he would be right!

That is not all. In the last two weeks again, the FEC also approved the sum of N712 billion to remodel the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA). In justifying this prodigious spending, we were told that by the time the facelifts were completed, Angels would want to fly to Nigeria because the airport would be as beautiful as the gold-paved streets of heaven!

Nobody is saying, by any stretch of argument, that the government should not fix decaying infrastructure. Our argument here is that the government should get its priorities right. The data gleaned from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) as of December 2023, gave a figure of over 5.9 million passengers at the MMIA in two years.

What percentage of Nigeria’s estimated population of over 200 million people is that? The simple implication is that there are far more Nigerians on the road than in the air. A government that is masses-sensitive will address critical segments that touch the lives of the highest population distribution. If more than 70 percent of Nigerians use road transportation, the focus should be on building more roads in addition to rehabilitating existing failed roads across the country.

In the last one week, Ekiti State has been in the news for the wrong reasons of the bad roads there. The videos of the terrible states of the roads are too graphic to ignore. The state is almost completely cut off from the rest of the country. And the situation is the same in all states of the Federation. There is no state in Nigeria without its own tales of woes when it comes to bad roads.

Worst hit is the Niger Delta where we get the resources that oil the engine of Nigeria. It is an eternal shame that the East-West Road has remained in perpetual state of construction. It is a national embarrassment that the terrible state of the Benin-Warri Expressway makes people spend six hours on a journey that was less than one hour before!

For Pete’s sake, the MMIA is not in a beauty pageant with any international airport. Yes, fix it, make it good but not with the humongous figures the government is throwing at us. That we are not hunters does not mean we cannot identify the spores of games on wet soil (àìi sode rí, kò ní ká má mo sa kò ko níhîn). If the government is looking for chop money for the boys, it should come out clean.

The defence by Tunde Moshood, Special Adviser on Media and Communications to Festus Keyamo, the Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, asking Nigerians to adopt a ‘more informed and constructive approach’ to the N712 billion MMIA project, is to say the least, very insensitive and insulting to our sensibilities. We cannot all be slaves to our stomachs; Moshood should be told to be bold enough to advise his boss and the government he represents that certain things can wait.  He and his boss are the ones to learn to gauge the mood of the people before they begin to call the dog monkey for us!

A Federal Government that is talking about building motor parks in a true Federal State needs elementary tutorials in Government and Devolution of Power. Minister Alkali got it completely wrong to think that lack of bus terminals is the reason why crimes like kidnapping and armed robbery happen on our highways.

The felons on the bad spots of the death traps we call highways don’t need any bus terminal or motor park to operate. They don’t have to register their vehicles and their content before they move to ‘sites’. We should be able to boast of someone with bare-bones penetration in this government. The jejune argument for the Federal Government ‘Modern Bus Terminals’ is annoying, very unnerving.

It is odiously nauseating that presumed men and women of class sat in that FEC to approve such a proposal. If the short among them is lacking in depth, the tall should show acuity (bí kékeré won bá gò, ó ye kí gíga won gbón). Someone should have shot down the Alkali’s proposal as lacking in sensitivity to the needs of the people. Someone should have reasoned that Nigerians cannot be going through the pain in the land and a FEC would be debating or approving inane proposals like the motor park project, no matter the deodorant sprayed on it!

How did they all sleep with their heads in one direction in that Council? How did the cabinet members come up with the conclusion that six motor parks in six different locations in our 36-state federation is the best the government could offer? And these are the ones leading Nigeria of 2025? Yes-men and women with illogical minds? Ghosh!

Can someone please tell President Tinubu to spare us this farce! Can those close to the President tell him that his boy, MC Oluomo, cannot be doing the monkey business of motor park management pan Nigeria as NURTW President,  while the Jagaban himself is running the same show at the centre, from Aso Rock? This ‘Modern Bus Terminals’ project is nothing but an agbero business. Mr. President, e kúrò nídìí ìdò, eré omodé ni (Leave the hide and seek game, it’s juvenile play)!

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Lasisi Olagunju

The Cambridge English dictionary defines ‘carcass’ as “the body of a dead animal, especially a large one.” The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was recently described as “a carcass” by one of its former governors, Mr Ayodele Fayose. Yet, that carcass defeated the reigning lion, the APC, in a decisive election in Oyo State at the weekend. PDP was dead; PDP is not dead. If I were the APC presidency, I would accept this reality as a divine warning. I would go back to work; I would talk and scheme less, I would start working truly for the people’s welfare. I would know that only this will kill the ‘dead’ enemy.

An APC leader told me that the Oyo election result was “the effect of bizarre developments in the APC.” He said the APC candidate “scored 6 (six) votes in his polling unit.” Oyo State APC truly has a huge reward problem. It has the liability of a Lagos-centric Abuja, unfair in appointments in Oyo, imperial in disposition. Does this solely explain the loss? It does not. Listen. I work and live in Ibadan and I know that the state governor, Seyi Makinde, has a firm grip on the politics of the state. His stellar performance as governor and his humility before the palace and the people have made it very easy for everyone to be his friend. It will take more than ‘federal might’ to defeat such a person now and in the future. Indeed, the by-election was a referendum on his six-year tenure as governor. It was also a pointer to how well the APC and its federal government have sold themselves to the people of Oyo State.

Defence Minister, Alhaji Muhammad Badaru Abubakar, is the immediate past governor of Jigawa State. His image handlers spent the night of Saturday and the whole of Sunday fighting off the news that he lost his Jigawa State polling unit to the PDP. Because bad news is good news, the story of the minister’s loss was quite popular on the internet. Then a report surfaced on Sunday that “Badaru did not vote at PU 001. His accredited polling station is PU 002. There, the APC secured 188 votes while the PDP scored 164 votes.”

The unit which the minister is disowning is Babura Kofar Arewa Primary School PU 001, very next to the one he claimed, and both situated in the same primary school compound. At that Unit 001, while APC polled 112 votes, PDP won with 308. Now, do the arithmetic. The minister did not vote in that unit, but his polling unit shares the same location with this unit where his party lost with a margin of almost 200 votes. Can we just add the two units’ votes together and ask the powerful minister to say something? Did his party win the election in that location? If I were the minister, I would keep quiet and nurse the wounds inflicted by a mere carcass.

The ruling party must be very unhappy at the pushback it got across the country on Saturday. The APC wants to go into the 2027 elections without opposition. And it is working really hard to achieve that. Poisoned carrots in the air; State of Emergency and defections down there; arrest and detentions here and there. Who will warn ‘them’ that what they desire is lethal? Where there is no opposition, there is no check upon corruption; the government itself becomes the opposition to good governance, and ultimately its own death. Find out why there are ample provisions for His Majesty’s Government and His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in England. There was a reason why democratic Canada, in 1905, provided a good salary for the leader of the opposition. Parliament voted that year to give the incumbent an additional salary allowance, “equal to that provided to Cabinet Ministers.”

C. P. Bhambhri in 1957 wrote ‘The Role of the Opposition in the House of the People (1952-56)’. In that seminal piece, he warns that: “In a community where no opposition parties are permitted, the alternative government is one of courtiers, policemen, soldiers and gangsters and it is only by violent methods that the government may be ousted.” It is the Indian’s argument that “an effective opposition renders a government a going concern. It prevents the formation of monopolies in politics. It ensures a neutral and non-political civil service and armed forces.”

Flood should stop thinking it will sweep away the river. What we saw in Saturday’s by-elections was a reassurance that despite everything, the opposition is alive in Nigeria, and the people and their democracy are safe. But it is not enough to be alive; it will be enough only if and when the opposition is not a living dead. A vibrant opposition is needed against a creepy dictatorship slithering into the walls of our democracy. Listen again to Bhambhri: “To find out whether a people is free it is necessary only to ask if there is an opposition and if there is, to ask where it is. The existence of a strong opposition is the greatest guarantee that there shall be no tyranny of the ruling party.”

So, the dead can come back, fight and win a war? There is a story in the October 1856 edition of the Church Missionary Society (CMS)’s ‘Quarterly Token For Juvenile Subscribers’. The story has this convoluted headline: ‘The dead, alive—The lost, found: Dasalu’s Odyssey.’ It is a story of death and of not dying. It reads: “In the Yoruba country, which you know is in West Africa, there was a town called Igbore. The Apena, or judge of the town, was named Deri. One of his sons, born about 1810, was generally called Dasalu, but sometimes Ogan. By and by, Igbore was destroyed by slave wars; but Deri and his family escaped to Iro. Afterwards they went to Ijana, where Deri died. Dasalu’s mother, Lutumbi, then took him to Ilaro, and finally to Abeokuta. Many Igbore people had settled there. That part of Abbeokuta in which they live is called Igbore. The boy grew up a bold, active young fellow, and the head of a party who used to roam about the country, seizing all the people they could, and selling them for slaves.” He later converted to Christianity and dropped his wild ways.

During the Dahomian invasion of Abeokuta on March 2, 1851, Dasalu was at the war front, defending his land. After the war, he was discovered to be among the missing. His elder brother, Lujobi, on the fifth day, claimed that he had found a headless corpse in a bush. He then proceeded to seize “the poor fellow’s property, to the amount of fifty pounds, as the headless corpse was claimed to be his.” However, it was later discovered that Dasalu had been captured, not killed, and was taken as a prisoner toward the coast. “Great was the stir the news made in Abeokuta. Well it might! Had not his dead body been found? So, everybody thought at the time. Everybody? Did Lujobi? Or did he knowingly pass off some other dead body (it was headless, remember) for Dasalu’s? Lujobi’s cruel conduct afterwards seems to condemn him.”

From his place of captivity, undead Dasalu managed to send a coded letter (àrokò) to his wife: a stone, a piece of charcoal, a pepper-pod, and a grain of parched maize, or Indian corn, all tied up in a rag.” What did this mean? “It meant that he was quite well, and as hard or strong as a stone. The prospect before him was, however, very dark, like charcoal. This has made him hot as pepper, and his body had dried like parched maize. While as for his cloth, it was a mere rag.” All attempts to ransom the man failed because he was known by his other name, Ogan. Years later, freed Yoruba returnees from Cuba brought news that Dasalu was alive there, writing as “Dasalu, the lost one.” He had been shipped as a slave but ended up in Havana after his vessel was seized. The British Consul eventually found him, and he was taken to England, where his photograph was made. So, Dasalu, once thought dead in the Dahomian war, was actually captured and enslaved, later found in Cuba, and eventually freed to return to his wife, Martha, in Abeokuta. His case is a dramatic story of loss, faith, betrayal, survival, and redemption.

The grim content of Dasalu’s aroko to his wife aptly represents the state of things with the PDP today. Like Dasalu, the carcass of the PDP rose from the cemetery to defeat the ‘Dahomians’ on Saturday in Ibadan. The Ibadan North Federal Constituency by-election saw a “dead” party blindsiding the all-powerful APC with 18,404 votes; the Abuja party struggled and netted 8,312. Now, do the maths: the difference is 10,092 votes. When a contest records such a margin of win, the Englishman would say it was a shellac. I would have borrowed from the Germans the word ‘blitzkrieg’ (lightning war) but that would have been grossly inappropriate to describe the Oyo State operation. It was not ‘surprise’ that overwhelmed the defeated on Saturday. No. Ogun Àwítélè means a war foretold; the defeated knew they would fall.

Check how the newspapers reported the result of Saturday’s electoral contests across the country; read the headlines: ‘PDP clears all 12 wards In Ibadan North by-election as APC candidate loses PU’;

‘Violence, vote-buying mar by-elections in Ogun, Kaduna, Kano;’ ‘Kano by-election marred by electoral malpractice, APC alleges’. Indian scholar, Railul Ramagundam, in January 2005, did a paper on the relationship between newspaper headlines and how a society is run. He entitled the piece: ‘The ‘State’ Revealed in Newspaper Headlines.’ The man says: “From a newspaper headline one can draw not just news and views about a society, but also ascertain the nature of the society and the state itself.” Those headlines are proof that Nigeria is very far from what the enemy designed for it: a one-party dictatorship.

Ramagundam wrote about India, but because scholarship is universal, we feel the validity of his thesis here, daily. Take this headline from last week: ‘After spending N21bn, FG budgets 180x more for Third Mainland Bridge repairs’. Someone in government would read this and wonder who the ‘subversive’ sub-editor was that cast that headline for Business Day newspaper. To announce the latest trillion naira contract binge of the Federal Government is to tell us that because opposition has collapsed in the parliament, money has become rainwater here. Almost all federal roads in the South -West are ‘dead’, less than two trillion naira will fix all of them. But works minister, David Umahi, said recently that he was begging the president for funds to fix the collapsed South-West roads; yet our president casually and calmly approved N3.8 trillion for a bridge repair in Lagos. And he will campaign for 2027 votes outside Lagos.

Each of the parties in Saturday’s by-elections across Nigeria must have learnt some lessons in how not to take the people for granted. For parties that are rent by the dog-eat-dog posture of politics, I recommend the Bible’s Mark 3:24-25: “And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

Folklorist Solomon T. Plaatje, in ‘English in Africa’ (September 1976) has this story for parties of the avaricious: Once upon a time a Bechuana village was attacked by an army, which chased the people from their homes. There remained among the ruins a cripple and a blind man. These two invalids agreed that the blind man should carry the cripple, that they should flee and follow the people. While they were passing through the country, the blind man carrying the cripple, the one who could see, saw some vultures hovering. So he told the one who had the use of his legs about it, and they went towards the place (where the vultures were hovering). There they found some vultures assembled round the carcass of a wild animal.

When they had driven away the vultures, a dispute arose between them (over the meat). The cripple said: “It was my eyes that found this anima”; the blind man said: “It was my feet that found it.” When their dispute became more heated, and they would not give in to one another, the cripple crawled away from the blind man. Then the blind man, being unable to see neither his companion nor the animal, called out: “My friend, it is evident that you are our eyes. Why should you lose your temper? I know that the animal was found by you.” The cripple heard his partner and came back and led the blind man to the animal, their food.

Our politicians will never step back as the blind man did. They quarrel over spoils, over positions, and over privileges, and won’t mind losing everything to birds of carrion.

The Bechuana tale speaks to the folly of selfishness and the wisdom of cooperation. It reflects directly on the greed of the avaricious in our politics. We wait to see which politician or party learns from this as we jog towards 2027, the year of the apocalypse. The cripple and blind man story teaches all scammers in power that collective survival depends on honest partnership; that those with vision need those with mobility, and vice versa. In 2015 and 2023, the wily among politicians forged alliances to take power; they succeeded in their mission; but the king and his men scammed many allies; they rewarded a few. They consolidated and moved further, scamming the people. Today, they elevate political 419 to state policy. With exclusive claims, they own a free meal they didn’t prepare. But do they know that their conduct invites vultures to come over, inherit and eat what should have sustained everyone?

Those who lost Saturday’s by-elections will lose the 2027 general elections unless they stop taking the people to be Shakespeare’s “blocks, stones… worse than senseless things.” The people may be hungry and powerless, but they are not stupid. They are waiting and watching. It is a cliché to say they will laugh last. Niyi Osundare says it better in ‘The Eye of the Earth’: the people always outlast the palace.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.