By Suyi Ayodele

Let us pray.

Our ‘fada’, who art in the Rock, pathos is thy love, thy government’s crush. Thy pain is killing, as in your predecessor’s government. Relieve us this day, our daily woes. And forgive us our foolishness, as shown in those who voted for you. Lead us not into deeper woes, but deliver us from death by hunger, thy will is our command, forever and ever. Amen!

There is no denying the fact that Nigerians are going through a lot this season. The pain in the land is palpable enough that one can comfortably slice it with a kitchen knife. For young parents and struggling Nigerians, January is a telling month. After the expenses of the Yuletide, there January bills await. A little wonder that the month is considered the longest.

But Nigerians have reason to be thankful to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, our ‘compassionate’ president and ‘fada’ of the masses. Looking down from the opulence of Aso Rock Villa, President Tinubu decided to have compassion on the hapless citizens. His government, we were told, would be doling out the sum of N75,000 each to 70 million Nigerians!

A compassionate father like Tinubu deserves our veneration. I read the report, and I marvelled at the ‘generosity’ of our president and his father-figure composure at all times. The ‘Spirit’ came over me like the Day of Pentecost, and I was inspired to compose the opening prayer – a parody of the Lord’s Prayer – in appreciation of our dearly beloved president. When a matter goes beyond weeping, my elders counsel that one should weave a joke around it. Like they say on the streets, I cannot come and kill myself by myself!

The Lord’s Prayer, otherwise known as Pater Noster or Our Father, is the prayer template given by Jesus Christ to His followers. The beauty of the model is that it contains everything mortals can ask from the Creator. Bible scholars note that the prayer contains seven petitions. This is the season of fasting and prayer by the Pentecostal world. I commend suffering Nigerians to the petitions contained in the Pater Noster. When a man knows where the affliction comes from, he needs no genius to proffer solutions. President Tinubu needs our veneration; he is giving us palliative to soothe the pain he inflicted on us the very day he took the mantle of leadership!

If I were to present a paper in Oral Literature, I would write on the topic: “Tinubu and Ajelójúonílé.” For those who are not familiar with the name, Ajelójúonílé is a tiny rat known in my local parlance as Eku Edá. Modern Yoruba usage gives it the descriptive name: Ajelójúonílé (He that eats in the presence of the house owner). It dares the owner of the house to do his worst!

The description illustrates the boldness of the rat which betrays its miniature figure. You find it in virtually every home. Very audacious, Ajelójúonílé crawls out of its burrow to eat the stocks in the home. It cares not if the owners are around. In fact, Ajelójúonílé comes out to eat the family patrimony when least expected and walks back majestically to its hole before the owners know what has happened.

The most striking peculiarity of Ajelójúonílé is its ability to bite without the victim realising it. It does that when the victim is deep asleep. It bites, blows air to soothe the pain and peels off the victim’s skin around the heels. The victim wakes up to discover blisters around the heels, which look inconsequential in the first instance. The victim only feels the pain when it attempts to walk.

Incidentally, killing Ajelójúonílé is not an easy task. The rat moves fast into the nearest closet. Most ‘hunters’ of Ajelójúonílé end up inflicting further pain on themselves, especially when the family engages in group ‘hunting’. Its tiny nature allows it to manoeuvre easily. How do people eradicate Ajelójúonílé, the rat that inflicts pains and applies soothe?

Nigerians should ask themselves this question at this crucial moment in the nation’s history. How do we navigate the current pain in the land? How do we ensure that in the next round of elections, the nation does not fall into the hands of incompetent leadership again?

As we ponder on this, we should not forget that our current husband is as wise as Ogungbe, the marksman hunter. Ògúngbè’s target, Àyáá (a species of monkey) is equally smart. In the game of wisdom, Àáyá limps, to deceive the hunter about its acrobatic agility, while Ògúngbè also stoops to cover up his height and ability to shoot high (Àyáá gbón, Ògúngbè náà gbón; Àáyá tiro, Ògúngbè náà lósòó). Who wins?

The government of President Tinubu has all the characteristics of Ajelójúonílé. It crawls on us all without knowing, bites us off and blows air to ameliorate the pain. We only wake up to discover the damage the rat had done to our heels over the night. And before we could complain, the government throws another talkability at us! With Tinubu, it is obvious that we have taken our promiscuity to Danimo’s house (A ti d’óko dé’lé dánímó)!

How many are we in Nigeria? I mean, what is our real figure as a people? We have had population projections in the last three decades or more. There is no demographic delineation that shows our social stratification of the poor, the poor-of the-poor and the rich and the-rich-of the rich. The only thing close to that is the recent revelation of President Tinubu, who, on a national media chat, said that the economic woes of his 19-month administration had reduced Nigerians driving five Rolls Royce to driving Honda. The only stratification the President forgot in the media parley is the rest of us who had Toyota Corolla, 2003 models, but who now use ‘Foot Wagen’.

When the righteous is on the throne, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people mourn, the Scripture records in Proverbs 29:2. Preachers of all Faiths ascribe the quality of listening ears to the Almighty. The same goes for President Tinubu, our ‘fada’ in the Aso Rock Villa. Like Yahweh listened to the cries of Israelites in the land of Egypt, President Tinubu has decided to listen to our wailing.

In his generosity and kindness, 70 million of us are going to get N75,000 each to cushion the effects of hardship caused! Tinubu’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Professor Nentawe Yilwatda, first disclosed this penultimate week while appearing on the Arise Television’s programmes, “The Morning Show.”

The minister said that the government intended to share the largesse in all the 36 states of the Federation using the National Identity Number (NIN). And he was not joking as he reiterated that President Tinubu’s target “is that we should target 15 million households. And an average household is about 4 to 5. We are discussing here roughly about 70 million households with about N75,000 per person this year.” The aim of President Tinubu “is to combat severe poverty and establish a more comprehensive social safety net including the project.”

What President Tinubu intends to do with his N75,000 palliative is exactly what Ajelójúonílé does to its unsuspecting victims. It is not funny that the man whose administration caused the “severe poverty” is the one trying to combat its creation through the N75,000 palliative, with focus on the “poorest of the poor!”

“We are doing the data capturing, but for now, the poorest of the poor that we have in our data is only 1.4 million with NIN. We are working with NIMC, deploying resources, and conducting training. NIMC has brought in more devices under a program with the World Bank to assist us in data capturing for those without NIN numbers.” Those are the ‘reassuring’ words of the minister.

When Minister Yilwatda mentioned that the money would be distributed using NIN, and that was also parroted by Aliyu Audu, Tinubu’s Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs, I was tempted to ask which NIN? I recall that in the last six months, I had had to either go to my bank or my telephone service providers to register, re-register, or correct my NIN. I also know that a lot of Nigerians are having issues with their NIN either for bank transactions or telecommunication purposes. A check on the pages of all dailies will show how many Nigerians pay for Change of Name adverts daily all in the name of wrong NIN! It is the same NIN that Yilwatda and Audu are projecting as a flawless system.

But that is the way of this government and its immediate predecessor. We cannot forget in a hurry that during the COVID-19 epidemic, when all schools were shut down because of the nationwide lockdown, the Gaskiya government of President Muhammadu Buhari spent billions of Naira to feed school children!

Mystery and deceit are the Siamese twins’ children of this administration since the All Progressive Congress (APC) took over power in 2015. If Fela Anikulapo were to be around, he would have done a remix of his album, “Government Magic”. It was that same magic that the APC deployed in the build up to the 2023 elections when it announced that it had registered 45 million members across the country.

The Governor Mala Bunu Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Committee (CECC) of the party which made the disclosure on May 27, 2022, said that it achieved the feat by raising the membership figures from 11 million to 45 million. But the cookies crumbled for the party when it went to the 2023 February presidential election and its candidate, now President Tinubu, won the election by 8,794, 726 votes. That figure shows that a whole 35,205.274 APC members did not show up on election day to vote for their party’s candidates. My elders warn that we should not argue with a man who cultivates 200 heaps of yam but announces that he has 400 heaps. The day of harvest will expose who the liar is!

So, while Nigerians are worried about how the Tinubu government would be able to identify the 70 million would-be beneficiaries of the N75,000 palliative, they should be consoled by the fact that a party that could concoct membership figures will conjure anything. Nobody should query if the methodology to be adopted will be scientific enough to erase any doubt. Ours is a nation in self-deceit, a nation of anything goes.

But for Senator Ajibola Basiru, who put a lie to the bogus APC membership figures of 45 million when he queried: “If we have that membership of 45 million, how come we went to the poll and got votes of less than 10 million? In line with Amilcar Cabral’s doctrine of ‘tell no lies, claim no easy victories’, that has exhumed the lie”, the APC and its members would still have believed the lies they told themselves.

Already, the Hallelujah orchestra of the government is at work to hail the N75,00 initiative of President Tinubu. The President is being described in some quarters as a kind-hearted president who feels the pain of the people. It would not matter who inflicted the pain in the first instance. It would equally not matter that the President is taking from our patrimony to ‘give’ to his imaginary “poorest of the poor”. The wisdom of Owó Àbú ni a fi ńse Àbú l’álejò (we use Abu’s money to entertain him) will not suffice here. Many don’t even care if the intended exercise would not be like the ones before it. Many of us, in the name of party loyalty and ethnic solidarity, are ready to accept the most unthinkable.

If President Tinubu recognises that there is a crushing poverty in the land, what is he expected to do? How come that the man that was sold to us as an expert in dermatology would leave leprosy to treat ordinary ringworm? What is more commonsensical between addressing the cause of the poverty in the land and giving palliative measures to cushion the effects? When the would-be beneficiaries exhaust the N75,000, what do they go back to?

The vocalist, Wande Coal, waxed his 2015 Mushin 2 Mushin Album, with a track which is equally a question: Se Na Like This. In that popular track, Coal asked: Se na like this we go de dey. Artistes, like poets, are philosophers and prophets. Wande Coal was philosophical in that album and track as he traced the trajectory of Nigeria from affluence to poverty! I join him in asking again: Se na like this we go de dey?

By Lasisi Olagunju

Two major projects were announced in Abuja last week: a polytechnic and a military barracks. Both were named after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. I thought the president would say no to such fawning sycophancy. But no. He appears to love it. He actually sat and presided over the inauguration and naming of the barracks.

A man goes to the stream to bathe and all maidens of the village struggle to be his wife or at least his mistress. That is the fortune of our president today; every loin scrambles for his hood. A sycophancy championship is afoot. If I were the president, I would be afraid and worried. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was offered the crown three times, and three times he rejected it. Yet, that gesture was used to consummate a conspiracy against him.

Niger State governor, Mohammed Umaru Bago, about this time last year, was overwhelmed by his love for our president. The governor looked up, he looked down, he thought of how best to sujada to the father of the nation. He raced to the airport in Minna and yanked off its recently printed name. The airport belongs to the Federal Government but the Niger governor told Tinubu’s TVC that in appreciation of the president’s magnanimity, he thought the only way his state could celebrate him (Tinubu) “for now” was to name that airport after him. Governor Bago said: “I sat down with my stakeholders, we got his (Tinubu’s) consent and his approval and here we are.”

RJust nine months earlier, the place was named Dr Abubakar Imam Kagara International Airport. Abubakar Imam (1911-1981) was a writer and pioneer in journalism in Nigeria. He edited Nigeria’s first Hausa language newspaper, Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo in 1939. Naming the airport after him in June 2023 was thought appropriate and fit. But by March 2024, the airport had another naming ceremony. It became Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Airport. Bago said Imam’s name had been given to a polytechnic since he was more a scholar. If I would be a bad boy, I would have used that point to ask Bago if he renamed the airport after the president as a confirmation that he is a frequent traveller. The president did not see anything wrong in his name being connected with such a change with such an argument. He was at the unveiling event in Minna to “commission the remodeled and upgraded terminal.” Tinubu was less than ten months in power when that honour fell on his shoulders. A commenter told BBC pidgin that time: “If na me be President Tinubu, I no go even accept di change of name.” Fortunately for Governor Bago and his stakeholders, Tinubu wasn’t that person.

Many more of such ‘recognitions’ will roll in for our president now that the world knows what tickles our Daddy.

Someone looked at all the frenzy and ‘feverity’ of last week in Abuja, and combined them with last year’s one in Minna, and suggested that we do something more monumental: we should change the name of our country to Tinubu Kingdom. Another suggested that ‘empire’ would be more appropriate. An emperor presides over an empire.

They may be right. If IBB, the man who built Abuja, had been as smart and quick and alert as this president, the Presidential Villa would by now be called Ibrahim Babangida House; or the city itself named IBB City. But the smart General was slack; he missed that opportunity to house every subsequent president in his ‘house’ and city. And if each of Tinubu’s other predecessors had been as alive as the incumbent, the FCT and the 36 state capitals would by now be galleries of their names and labels. But they were all like Babangida – too shy, or too careful – to do what Napoleon now does.

And, why not change Abuja, our federal capital’s name to Tinubu? After all, the Liberian capital, Monrovia, is named after James Monroe, America’s fifth president who pioneered the creation and colonization of Liberia. Monrovia, until 1824, was known as Christopolis. It was originally created in 1822 by Monroe and his friends as a solution to the problem of having too many blacks in their United States. We have a local example. Port Harcourt, our garden city, owes its identity to the name of Sir Lewis Harcourt, the British Secretary of State for the colonies who approved and supervised the amalgamation that birthed Nigeria.

There are more ancient local examples that will strengthen our argument for a total, comprehensive and permanent immortalisation of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And it is significant that these positive vibrations are coming from northern Nigeria where there are plenty of points to pick from history. History says Daura, the spiritual home of Hausa people, is named after a woman, Magajiya Daurama, the ninth queen of that town. History adds that even the city called Katsina is named after a princess of Daura named Kacinna. There is a major town in Jigawa State called Hadejia. Hadejia is a toponym derived from the names of a hunter and his wife who founded the town. Their respective names were Hade and Jiya. We can use these examples to promote our next motion that the FCT should become the next addition to our president’s honour. For regional balancing, I wanted similar examples from Yorubaland to bolster our argument but I spent the whole of yesterday asking around if there was a traditional Yoruba town named after a human being, living or dead. I am still searching.

Tinubu as governor of Lagos State did not do these things for himself or for those who made him. Those he made have not done so too. So, he is lucky Nigeria is bigger, more generous, more appreciative.

It is true that Abuja is not Lagos. The demons controlling the aura of both places are different in the virulence of their demands and expectations.

In ‘The Art of War’, Sun Tzu says “the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone.” Tinubu is the superior man here. You would think he would be “watchful over himself” from the assaults of sycophants and parasites. But no. He enjoys every bit of the game. He is too big to be bothered about external corruption and internal corruptive tendencies. A large mirror is placed before him everywhere he goes, and he loves the big, ‘beautyful’ something he sees in that mirror. So, why risk his anger by warning him about his nakedness? I also join my voice to the voices of his worshippers and adherents, people who say he is an idol.

If a man would be blind, my people warn such a person to be completely blind. Half-blind persons are perfect mongers of trouble. We can’t copy America’s presidential democracy without copying everything in and about it. The United States is currently savouring the sweetness in our sour soup: a lawmaker is proposing a third term for Donald Trump who started his second term just last week. America is fated to fall in love with the content of our shithole. We should reciprocate that love.

Give-me-I-give-you is what the toad croaks at the river bank. We should also go the American way by making idols of our presidents, past and present – particularly the present. Let us name our country and its capital, Abuja, after this hardworking Tinubu. Washington State and Washington DC in the United States are named after America’s first president, George Washington. Many of his worthy successors were similarly honoured with cities created in their names: There is the city of Lincoln in Nebraska named after Abraham Lincoln; There is Jackson in Mississippi named after Andrew Jackson; Jefferson City is in Missouri, the name honours Thomas Jefferson. There is also Madison in Wisconsin; it is named after President James Madison. We should not ask if these presidents did all these for themselves during the lives of their presidency. Except we are an ungrateful lot, our own president deserves honours as those that are sure to last beyond the end of the world. That is what an appreciative nation does.

An airport, a polytechnic and a barracks wearing the name of an incumbent president who is less than two years old in office is nothing. Those who did it have not done a tenth of what obtains in other countries of this continent. Hastings Kamuzu Banda was president of Malawi from 1964 to 1994 – thirty short years. I first came in contact with him and his ways in Jack Mapanje’s ‘Of Chameleons and the Gods’ taught me by Funsho Aiyejina (God repose his soul). While he was alive, Banda got his name inscribed on everything he touched: roads, hospitals and schools and everything that would make him live forever. At his death, 14 May of every year was declared ‘Kamuzu Day’ in celebration of the life of the father of the nation. An attempt to denigrate his memory surfaced soon after his exit. A succeeding president, in a fit of madness, declared 14 June as ‘Freedom Day’ to mark the end of Banda’s dictatorship. That insult did not last beyond the next election. Banda’s spirit moved against that president and his place another took. Another president soon came to sanitise the memory of their lord and saviour. He cancelled the dirty ‘Freedom Day’. Banda’s name is on an international airport and on other national monuments. That is how countries show gratitude to their fathers.

Literature scholar, Reuben Makayiko Chirambo, in 2010 wrote a piece in ‘Africa Today’ on the memories “of the Father and Founder of the Malawi Nation, Dr. H. K. Banda.” He wrote that some of Banda’s supporters hailed him as Ngwazi which means ‘Conqueror’. Some others called him Nkhoswe – ‘guardian’, ‘protector’, ‘provider’. Yet, to a large number of others, he was simply “savior, messiah, father and founder of the nation.” Banda’s fanatics pronounced him Wamuyaya – meaning, president for life. When I read that, I wanted to say may that not be our portion in Nigeria. But I cautioned myself. That would have been a very subversive prayer. May my mouth not kill me.

For those who say that it is too early for Tinubu to start inscribing his name on our breasts and buttocks, they should go check Banda’s records. It is from Chirambo that we read that in 1963, one full year before Malawi got independence, Kamuzu Banda had already boasted that: “I am dictator of the people by consent . . . by permission.” He was that open and transparent even before he took full control of the country. Leaders who would be ‘father’ and ‘saviour’ of their nation don’t sneak in their dagger under their tunic. They come early in broad daylight clutching the flashing torch of narcissism. Banda did his dictatorship so well that a cowardly Malawian poet, Frank Chipasula, in 1981 wrote a poem from exile in celebration of the president. The title: ‘A Monument to a Tyrant’.” If we work hard enough, Banda can be our model. We will benefit from his memory.

But why are the president’s friends and fans making a Banda out of him? The old man can still get all the honour being dashed him later when he is done and is found to have done well with the power he has. Obafemi Awolowo, Murtala Muhammed, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa are some of the examples he can copy. But he is not looking the way of those legends. He has not done well by not stopping all sycophantic drooling around him. He is an elder who ought to know that there are implications and consequences for the wealthy who choose to eat salt according to the size of their wealth. The president’s morsel is in improper dalliance with soup that draws and soils the breast embroidery.

When a democracy grows old and wrong, it becomes an oligarchy. Someone said that in a democracy, the key actors are idolators; in an oligarchy, they are idols. I know that in vain are all these lines and calls for sanity and moderation. Idolators must worship their idols. So, I plead that if we all want to survive the courtiers of this president, all of us – journalists, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, law breakers and law enforcers – will perform one last duty. We should join voices and forces, rename our country, rebuild the Presidential Villa and the FCT and make all of them bear the name and logo of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He deserves the honour.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Depending on what view one takes of the matter, 10 February 2025 promises to be Proxy Wars Day at the Supreme Court of Nigeria in Abuja. On that day, a panel of five Justices of the Supreme Court will take arguments on seven appeals connected with the synthetic political crisis in Rivers State.

The issues that the court will be asked to decide include the validity of last October’s local government elections in the state; the fate of the faction in the Rivers State House of Assembly who claim to have switched their affiliation from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP, on whose platform they were elected) to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC); the legality of the state’s 2025 budget passed by the rump of the state House of Assembly; and the effort to importune judges into denying Rivers State access to its share of the Federation Account.

The effort to frame these as legal issues is transparently valiant. Despite the shameful conversion of judges into politicians in the Rivers State crisis – or indeed because of precisely that fact – the imminence of Rivers State Proxy Wars Day at the Supreme Court is evidence of what has gone wrong with Nigeria’s judicial system and why fixing it is essential for the health of Nigeria’s attempt at government with electoral legitimacy.

This is not the first time that legal disputes about power and how to share the spoils from it have ended up at the highest court in the land. That tendency in Nigeria is over a century old and arguably goes back to the 1921 judgment of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the case of Amodu Tijani, over the effort by the colonial authorities to split Herbert Heelas Macaulay from his support for Eshugbayi Eleko, the Oba of Lagos.

For the hearing of that case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1920, Herbert Macaulay travelled to London with the Oba’s Staff of Office in support of Amodu Tijani and the Idejo Chiefs of Lagos. From London, he issued a statement claiming that the Eleko was the King of over 17 million Nigerians and in possession of a territory more than three times that of Great Britain. Despite a healthy revenue of over £4 million, he claimed, the British had reneged on a treaty commitment to compensate the Eleko.

Embarrassed at being publicly called duplicitous in this way, the British required the Eleko to disown Herbert Macaulay. He issued a public statement clarifying his position on Herbert Macaulay’s statement but declined to disown him through the Oba’s Bell Ringers, as the Brits required.

Unable to secure the support of the popular Eleko, the colonists chose to head off rising tension by deposing him. On 6 August 1925, they issued an ordinance de-stooling him and, two days later, on 8 August, they arrested and removed the Eleko into internal banishment in Oyo. In his place, they installed Oba Ibikunle Akitoye.

Oba Akitoye’s rule lasted an uncomfortably brief three years, largely because he lacked the support of the people of Lagos. Indeed, in 1926, he suffered physical assault by his people. Supported by the elite and people of Lagos, the deposed Eleko took his case to the courts, fighting all the way once more to the Privy Council, which decided on 19 June 1928 in favour of his claim for leave for a writ of habeas corpus. This all but sealed the fate of Oba Akitoye, who is suspected to have facilitated his own earthly demise shortly thereafter.

The crisis in Rivers State shares some unsettling similarities with the events in Lagos nearly one century ago. In Rivers today, as in Lagos then, a powerful man – in this case the current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and immediate past governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike – seeks to banish the current governor of Rivers State, Siminalayi Fubara, from office using surrogates beholden to him in the state House of Assembly.

There is one important difference, though: the issues in Rivers State today hardly involve principle or the public interest. Framed though they are in legalese, these cases from Rivers State are about power and money grab. This is not a first. It appears to be the standard procedure of the current FCT Minister to seek to inveigle judges into acting as his political surrogates under ruse of law.

In instigating this crisis, Mr. Wike suffered a characteristic failure of his frontal lobe and forgot his public vow to “give himself that respect” and not interfere in the affairs of the state after his exit from the office in May 2023. Rather, since leaving office as the state governor, Mr. Wike has sought to install himself as both the Minister in Abuja and Sole Administrator in Port Harcourt. He makes no effort to conceal the fact that much of what passes as his political dare-devilry appears to be accomplished under the influence of sufficiently gluttonous amounts of dangerous beverage as to entitle him to access to a defence of automatism in criminal law.

In October 2024, he told Seun Okinbaloye with undisguised hubris on Channels Television that the only solution to the crisis in Rivers State was for the incumbent governor to “obey court judgment.” This was no advocate for the rule of law, however. Instead, Mr. Wike projected an air of political impregnability purchased with a currency bearing a distinct whiff of procured judicial crookery.

To be fair, this is not something entirely unexpected of an ambitious Nigerian politician without an alternative address (apologies to Deji Adeyanju). What is more difficult to overlook is the high judicial tolerance for undisguised political importuning of judges.

Nigeria’s judicial system has been overtaken by a category known as “political cases.” In November 2023, former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Olukayode Ariwoola, reported that his Supreme Court registered 1,271 motions and appeals from 12 September 2022 to 11 July, 2023, out Of this, the court “heard 388 political appeals, 215 criminal appeals and 464 civil appeals.” Two years earlier, in 2021, Ariwoola’s predecessor, Tanko Muhammad, reported that the court’s portfolio of 269 appeals disposed of included 139 civil appeals, 102 criminal appeals, and 28 “political cases”.

According to CJN Ariwoola’s report, the court “delivered a total number of 251 judgments, of which 125 were political appeals, 81 were civil appeals, and 45 were criminal appeals.” In just two years, the output of the court fell by 6.69% but “political cases” rose from 10.67% to 49.8%. Even allowing for the fact that 2023 was an election year, this is system collapse.

Nigeria’s judges appear to have decided that the only people entitled to exit from the courts are politicians. In turn, the politicians are happy to enjoy this exclusivity and to overwhelm the courts to the point that even judges now complain. They hire the priciest lawyers to frame undisguised power and money grabs as questions of law.

The Supreme Court can end this but feigns reluctance to. Rather, the court affords powerful politicians the kind of tolerance that they are unwilling to extend to lesser mortals, preferring instead to enable this joint enterprise of senior lawyers and politicians while fettering its own capacity to determine for itself what should be a question of law deserving of its rarefied attention.

This sucks for many reasons. It prostitutes the bench; casualizes the constitutional guarantee of fair trial “within a reasonable time”; and portrays the judiciary as captured.

To describe this as Supreme pusillanimity is to be generous. It is a form of judicial lasciviousness syndrome, promenading judicial wares before political gawkers in a peonage system in which the only effective currency is high political patronage. In these Rivers State cases, the Supreme Court has an opportunity to make a bold statement. If it doesn’t, then it should be ready for many more proxy war days yet.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

By Louis Aminadokiari Koko

On 18 December, 2024, the President of Nigeria, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu presented a fiscal appropriation bill of N47. 9 trillion to be financed by taxes, export revenues from oil and gas, and non- oil. However, these projected receipts are not sufficient to have a balanced budget. Therefore, the budget has a deficit of N13. 4 trillon to be financed by both domestic and external debts.

It is also projected that Nigeria will produce 2.01 million barrels per day of crude oil and the price has an average projected estimate of $75 /barrel . What this means is that if we produce the volume of crude oil and the price averages on $75/barrel, we need to still borrow about N13.14 billion to finance the 2025 budget as to deliver on its theme: Budget of Restoration, Securing Peace and Rebuilding Prosperity.

As lofty and assuring this budget theme sound, it appears that what is coming out of the land of the free and the country of the brave ( USA) whose current President is a maverick and a transactional politician is capable of causing oil price shocks for oil revenue dependent countries of the world, if US oil companies ramps up crude oil production which may likely cause global oil glut in the international market .

If USA becomes self sufficient in crude oil production, then the oil supply in the international market may exceed demand thereby causing downward adjustments in prices of crude oil.

I foresee drastic decrease in crude oil price to about $45 to $55 per barrel. This forecast is based on the average oil price in 2016 during DT 1.0 administration.

If this scenario painted here plays out in 2025, that is average crude oil price of $45 to $55 per barrel in the international market, how can Nigeria finance the 2025 budget that already has a deficit of over N13 trillion?

Assuming that Nigeria produces the targeted 2.01 million barrels per day, can Nigeria sell this daily production quantity if crude oil supply is already saturated in the international market?

What may likely happen is that the gulf in the FG 2025 budget will further increase , that is, the deficit will further expand with its consequences on the economy. The federal government maybe unable to finance the capital projects, which may lead to under performance.

Other consequences of likely oil glut as germane to our economy are many but not limited to the following.

1. Exchange rate of naira to dollar will continue to increase causing serial depreciations of naira. This is not good for an import dependent country like Nigeria.
2. Interest rates will continue to increase and crowding out domestic private investments.
3. Cost of living crisis will escalate
4. Poverty will increase
5. Crime will increase and Nigeria maybe in dire situation.
6. Nigeria may find it difficult to service her external debts and this can cause the country to move into debt trap.
   All these adverse consequences will flow out of President Donald Trump’s decision to ramp up oil production and supply which is likely to cause global oil glut and decrease in average price of oil in the international market this year. Nigeria will be worse hit by this Trumpism effect.

Louis Aminadokiari Koko, Esq (PhD)