By Lasisi Olagunju

Immediate past Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, recently waxed proverbial and made a Facebook post which sounded like a loud complaint: “The axe forgets but the tree remembers…They are the axe. We are the trees. We have long memories. God Bless Nigeria. Amen.” El-Rufai made that sour post on June 13, 2023 – about three weeks ago. It sounded very ominous and sparked a feeling of deja vu. I read his post again, especially the two sentences: “They are the axe. We are the trees.” I felt like asking El-Rufai: who are the ‘they’ assailing innocent trees with their axes; and who are the ‘we’ – the victim-trees with ‘long memories’? But then, I could see that the message was his most popular social media post in recent times, attracting more than ten thousand likes and almost three thousand comments. Some of the commenters threw it back at the former governor. They said he was the axe and should stop acting the victim. One comment reads: “You are the axe here, Mallam. We, the citizens, are the trees. We’ll never forget.” And another: “We will remember; we will tell our children the stories when the time is right.” What stories?

El-Rufai described what he wrote as an African proverb. He may be correct. But where I come from, we say songs always presage rebellion (orin níí síwájú òtè, owó genge níí síwájú ijó). Nineteenth century American author, abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass, said a variant of this: “The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.” I think Nigeria should ask brilliant El-Rufai to explain what he meant and who wronged his “we”. If he says it is a harmless promise, a warning to his allies, then we may ask: what sort of man removes a fly from his friend’s forehead with a hatchet?

Beyond El-Rufai’s proverbs, I also like his choice of quotes. Take his Thomas Friedman quote of 15 October, 2022: “….sometimes the news is in the noise, in what is being said and shouted, and sometimes the news is in the silence, in what isn’t being said at all.” I would recommend that quotation to every person in government today who goes about sleeping because the traumatized hungry street is not saying anything. Think of everything that has happened in the last one month. Our government has removed fuel subsidy. The effects have been immediate in ruination and teeth gnashing. My problem here is not just petrol subsidy removal. How about where the gains will go? The gains will very likely feed the greed of the power elite or the elite will tell us there has been no gain yet; that we should, like Animal Farm’s Boxer, work harder and stop whining.

El-Rufai’s proverb says the tree does not forget what the axe does. Is that really true? If it is, why then does the tree continue to empower the axe with the comfort of wooden handles to wreak more havoc? Before our very eyes, we saw how perfect acts of acquiescence in the Orwellian Animal Farm wrecked the years from 2015 to 2023. A reenactment of same is afoot. Every squeal of disapproval from young porkers today attracts nauseating bleating from the sheep of the farm; the dogs of Napoleon, with menacing growls, tell their mates in hunger that the leader does right always. We are not complaining. We take anything our government offers; even when it offers nothing, we take and clap. “When Napoleon begins executing other animals, Boxer can only say, ‘I would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm. It must be due to some fault in ourselves. The solution, as I see it, is to work harder.’”

They are the axe, we are the tree. The people are increasingly made the fodder for the Knight’s horse, his charger. The government is celebrating a crash in demand for petrol as an achievement. They call it lifestyle change; the poor call it trekking, suffering and sweating. Where are Tinubu’s policies against the rich? Installmental death of the poor is afoot. The elite applaud appropriate pricing of petrol. But the poor wears that shoe, he feels the pain. Petrol marketers have served us another notice of misery. They said from this month, because of the realities of the new FX policy, they may start selling petrol for N700 per litre. If and whenever that happens, the people will most likely ask if this democracy is really about them. That will be very dangerous. Again, Fredrick Douglass warned: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

International money lenders are also the axe here. They insist that there are too many trees in our forest. They cut, trim and prune life and living out of our lives. It is as if they do not care if the human ecosystem is destroyed and our forest becomes a desert. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are happy and dancing that Tinubu did well by carrying out what they called bold reforms. But most developed countries subsidise energy. Indeed, there is a report that German Finance Minister, Christian Lindner, last November made plans for his country to spend €83.3 billion ($83.4 billion) on gas and electricity subsidies this year. Bloomberg, which published the report in November 2022, said it got it from a document it obtained from the ministry. Germany does that as we speak and it is not alone here. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that consumption subsidies for fossil fuels doubled in 2022 to $1 trillion globally. A March 2023 report by Reuters said estimated oil subsidies in the US are as high as $50 billion per annum. No government in America has been able to stop it as part of the country’s transition to clean energy to tackle climate change. “Even with a commanding Democratic majority in the Senate in Obama’s first six years in office, he was unable to kill the subsidies. For many governments, keeping consumer energy prices affordable is the top priority. That’s why numerous countries, ranging from Japan to Brazil, last year imposed or increased subsidies to cushion consumers from skyrocketing prices,” the Reuters report said.

I have not heard the IMF and the World Bank tell those powerful countries that it was wrong to keep fuel prices low with subsidies. But at the launch of the Nigeria Development Update for June 2023 in Abuja last week, Alex Sienaert, chief economist at World Bank Nigeria, applauded Nigeria and its Tinubu. He said “the recently undertaken PMS subsidy and FX reforms are historic.” He said our country will make savings of N3.9 trillion in 2023 alone and that the action had stopped “Nigeria from going over a fiscal cliff and sets the stage for a new, upward Investment, growth, and development trajectory.” Then, he warned that “headline inflation is expected to rise…to 25 percent in 2023.” He added that if there were no buffers to cushion the impact of these reforms, over 7.1 million Nigerians would be further thrown into the poverty net. Ari Aisen, resident representative of the IMF in Nigeria, at the same event, said the reforms were long overdue. If you complain as I do about the effects, the IMF man had a response: it is natural that the policies have some side effects. “We have seen inflation already high and it is likely to increase further…” I read the IMF man and wondered if he did not know that many of the urban and rural poor have been made to believe that the spike in petrol price is just for some time. We need someone to tell the hopeful to tighten their seat belts because this láálá that has gone up isn’t going to come down to earth again.

Tinubu has been too much of a critic to fail in providing better life for the people. If he fails (we his friends say God forbid), he will be fed what he and his group regularly fed presidents who came before him. He will be introduced to the court hall where Thomas Rymer’s poetic justice is libatory wine, the undying gavel that “seeks to give to each what is owed.”

Inscrutable fate has heaved Tinubu onto power. Critics sometimes find themselves on the throne. When they do, they very often, because of their enormous street sense, get overconfident and take the people for granted; and, when they do this, they fail and fall and their enemies proceed to rejoice over them. I cite an example. Dr. Kofi Busia was one of the key opposition leaders whose criticisms provided the military the needed axe to sack Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, in 1966. Busia later got elected and sworn in as Prime Minister on October 1, 1969 and hit the ground running. Within the first six weeks of his Prime ministership, he promulgated the Aliens Compliance Order of 18 November, 1969 under which he chased an estimated 191,000 Nigerians and thousands of other nationals out of Ghana. His domestic economic policies were harsh and largely ineffective in making life better for the people of Ghana. He did everything he did to please the “international community” and made sure he was a friend of America and, unlike Nkrumah, supported Big Brother “on all procedural votes.” The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a declassified November 3, 1971 memo to the White House noted with applause that Busia’s policies had “earned him the respect and support of the World Bank, the IMF, etc…” The CIA noted in particular that “Busia has followed highly moderate policies, adopted two straight austerity budgets, and refused to renege on the inherited debts. As a result, he is subject to a good deal of domestic pressure and the success of Ghana’s experiment with responsible democratic government is in doubt…” As correctly read by the CIA, Busia soon suffered a fate similar to Nkrumah’s – his ‘friends’ booted him out of office in January 1972, two months, 10 days after that memo was written. Almost immediately after the putsch, exiled Nkrumah fired what he called “a letter of consolation” to the fallen Busia, his former arch critic.

Cheeky, old Nkrumah wrote salt right into the injury of smarting Busia who had just fallen from power. A few lines from his three-page letter here: “I am sure that you realise that those who criticise other people without bothering to assign good reasons for their criticisms eventually end up as victims of their own circumstances. You will also appreciate the fact that those who sow a wind reap a whirlwind, and after you have finished spoiling other people, you will be surprised to find out that you have spoilt yourself.”

I watched President Tinubu in Ijebu Ode and Abeokuta last week. His movement suggested a sure-footed somebody. I watched him and wondered if he knew that tying the nuptial knots with one’s favourite lady is not the sole objective of marriage. He needs to be told that what makes the seas is more than seawater. Getting the presidency, complete with its power and glory, is not the end; making it work for the comfort of the people is. The eight million plus people who voted for him in February and the remaining millions on the street are dying slowly of hardship made worse by his recent policies. He withdrew petrol subsidy and is proud of it; he should be proud of enacting counter-policies that will deaden the pains. After all, when he was young and struggling, did he not join his folks to say that the one who knows how to eat isin must also know how to pluck out the death in its eyes?

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Since well before Nigeria’s return to elective governance in 1999, the country has been overtaken by a progressive escalation of what Hannah Arendt in her classic On Violence called “a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics.” In contemporary  Nigerianism, the word for this is “banditry”.

“Bandits” is a conveniently capacious bogeyman for insecurity in Nigeria that precludes necessary questions as to the provenance of the descent into lawlessness. It captures diverse elements that may include terrorists, cultists, herdsmen, kidnappers, criminal gangs, and militants.

Originally applied to the motorcycle gangs who perpetrate carnage in different parts of Nigeria’s north-west, bandits have now become the trope for an intolerable toll of destruction by mostly non-state entities as well as the inexplicable haplessness of Nigeria’s federal government that has never been known to cringe at the thought of exterminating significant numbers of its citizens. This lamentable situation compels a retrospective on how what the country now calls banditry evolved.

Since Independence, successive governments in Nigeria have confronted variants of banditry. The evidence over time suggests a link between governance, its failures, and what is now called banditry. As a usage, it conflates two underlying crises – government without consequences and ungoverned spaces.

In This Present Darkness, his history of organized crime in Nigeria, Stephen Ellis traces post-independence banditry in Nigeria to “shortly before the civil war, when government broke down in some parts of the Western Region and there was a blurred line between political violence, crime, and organized insurgency.” When the war ended in 1970, the military regime failed to manage demobilization.

In Southern Nigeria, which comprises a mere 29% of Nigeria’s nearly 924,000 km² of landmass, urban banditry ensued. Armed robbery in built-up areas of the country was an early manifestation. An early exponent of this was Ishola Oyenusi, a high-school dropout who chose to be called “the Doctor” and terrorized Lagos at the end of the Civil War. In response, the military government introduced mandatory death by firing squad for convicted armed robbers. The first public executions took place in front of Bar Beach, in Victoria Island, Lagos on 26 April 1971. Less than four and a half months later, on 8 September 1971, Oyenusi was executed at the same location.

The pace of public executions quickly escalated. By 1979, Nigeria had publicly executed over 500 armed robbers by firing squad. In 1984 alone, the regime of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, shot at least 355. In 1985, it killed another 301 by firing squad. In 12 years between 1984 and 1996, over 1,200 of such executions took place.

In 1984, the response of General Muhammadu Buhari to the emergence of drug trafficking as a new dimension to outlawry in Nigeria was also the firing squad. Far from being mitigated, however, drug trafficking by Nigerians became more organized, more lucrative, and more violent.

In a little-noticed release on 21 December 2018, Nigeria’s then Defence Minister, Mansur Dan-Ali, a retired one-Star General from Zamfara State, complained: “the issue of (sic) drug abuse, unemployment and governance amongst others contributes to the deplorable security situation in Zamfara State.” In the same month the Buhari administration launched a Presidential Advisory Committee on the Elimination of Drug Abuse chaired by retired Brigadier Buba Marwa. The membership included the wives of both the President and the Vice-President. In the four decades that separated the beginning and end of Buhari’s two tours of duty as head of state, Nigeria’s response to organized drug cartels had evolved from firing squad to pillow-talk.

It appeared that each succeeding decade saw an intensification of urban outlawry in different parts of southern Nigeria. In the 1980s, the poster-boy was Lawrence Anini, another school drop-out who concatenated indiscriminate violence with a touch of Robin Hood in a peculiar form of advocacy for the downtrodden.

Anini’s reign of terror in the then Bendel and surrounding states was facilitated by the complicity of some senior police personnel who helped to provide his gang with intelligence and disappeared evidence against them. When two members of his gang were convicted in mid-1986 following effective police work, Anini turned his guns against the police in an intense rampage of mass killing, during which 10 police officers in Bendel State died between August and October 1986. That would prove to be his undoing.

Military President, Ibrahim Babangida, turned up the heat on then Inspector-General of Police, Etim Inyang, famously asking him during a meeting of the then ruling military council in October 1986: “where is Anini”? Two months later, in December 1986, the police arrested Anini and dismantled his gang, which included George Iyamu, a Police Superintendent. In March 1987, they were executed.

In the 1990s, Shina Rambo terrorised parts of south-west Nigeria with similar escapades. In south-east Nigeria, the Otokoto case in Owerri, Imo State, in 1996 revealed a netherworld of ritualized human sacrifice.

By the 2000s, political violence and assassinations would emerge as dominant forms of outlawry. With the introduction of online banking to minimize cash-in-transit, armed robbers began stealing human beings in order to get their money. Commercial kidnapping boomed. In Osisikankwu (Obioma Nwankwo) in Abia State and resource militants in the Niger Delta traded in this. In parts of south-east Nigeria, politicians and these organized crime gangs made common cause leading government to break down. In response, a bandit, vigilante horde, known as Bakassi Boys took over the streets.

Three additional factors collaborated in launching this new phase.

First, public universities incredibly became fertile breeding grounds for outlaws. The story originated in competition among university-based confraternities, which forced the Pyrates Confraternity, the oldest of these confraternities in Nigeria, to leave the universities about 1986. The Supreme Eiye Confraternity (National Association of Airlords) emerged in Lagos around 1965 as rival to the Pyrates. In Ibadan, the National Association of Sealords, better known as the Buccaneers, followed by 1972. University of Calabar produced the Klansmen Confraternity and in University of Port Harcourt, the Vikings emerged. These university cults “pursue their cause with brazen audacity and outright disregard for the laws of the country.”

The growth of these groups coincided with the emergence of articulate civic activism in the universities led by the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), later known as the National Association of Nigerian students (NANS). Military rulers co-opted these cults to disrupt official student activism. Competing groups in the politics of university administration also found them useful. In the Niger Delta, Stephen Ellis recalls, they “became a factor in the region’s politics.”

Second, mismanagement of natural resources exploitation in the country energized the transition from urban to rural banditry. Southern Kaduna, for instance, had always been rich in gemstones, including diamond, sapphire, quartz, ruby, temaline, and aquamarine. In the early-to-mid 1980s, this set off a mad rush of artisanal gemstone rustlers who invaded communities in Jema’a. The rustlers came from as far as Mali, Senegal and Sudan in search of shiny gemstones that the locals called “devil stones”.

In 1986, Newswatch Magazine’s Aniete Usen reported “cases of eliminating by kidnapping, sudden disappearance of dealers and diggers and a whole range of other blood-chilling tales. The barons, agents and diggers became fanatically…. fully armed with automatic weapons.” The weapons they brought into Southern Kaduna would feature prominently in the first Kafanchan crisis in 1987. Their methods have been evident in the descent from artisanal mining to organized banditry in Birnin-Gwari and Zamfara three decades later.

Third, Babangida’s transition to civil rule programme created a mutual support network between politicians, robbers and cults. In the Niger Delta, the military regime of General Abacha introduced guns to quell civic advocacy for resource justice. In 1994, they deployed the Joint (Military) Task Force. Three decades later, the guns are everywhere and the JTF is mired in an interminable mission.

By 2008, Mujahid Asari Dokubo, asked how the armed youths in the Niger Delta who traded in violence acquired their weapons, answered the Rivers State Truth and Reconciliation Commission presided over by former Supreme Court Justice, Kayode Eso, that “the guns were purchased with money disbursed by politicians.”

Quite clearly, successive regimes in Nigeria have found pockets of banditry useful in the enterprise of taking and keeping power. Unsurprisingly, politicians are mostly half-hearted in fighting it. During elections in 2023, for instance, banditry nearly vanished remarkably. Immediately after the vote, it resumed with full force. It seems rather evident that in Nigeria now, the bandits and the politicians are in bed with one another.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]. A version of this article first appeared in December 2018 as “Banditry in Nigeria: A Brief History of A Long War.”

No country desirous of productivity can afford to deliberately put her people out of work in the name of religious ceremonies as Nigeria does. The idea of unending public holidays is not only absurd but also sickening.

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

The idea of this week’s column is not original. Neither is the title. Both came from two senior citizens who are not only fans of TheNiche but also religiously comment on almost every story we publish.

Expectedly, our story on Monday, Eid-el-Kabir: FG declares Wednesday, Thursday public holidays, caught their attention. One of them, an elder stateswoman and retired Federal Permanent Secretary, exclaimed: “Very convenient! So they can take off from Tuesday to Friday. Unserious, unproductive country.”

I was still pondering over that when the elder statesman, a retired boardroom guru, sent a cryptic riposte: “Useless country.”

Then, he followed it up with another text: “12 Christians, 12 Muslims, State fights to get 12. 36 no work days. Plus 52×2 – 104 Saturdays and Sundays – almost 140 days of no work in a wretched country that is the poverty capital of the world. Idiotic!”

That may be an exaggeration but it is close to reality because when it comes to no work days, Nigeria only competes with such countries as Myanmar, Nepal, Iran, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia.

That is not a good company to keep for a country with 63 percent of its population (133 million people) multi-dimensionally poor and 41 percent unemployed.

The tragi-comedy has been made worse by the supremacy battle of the two dominant religions – Christianity and Islam – none of which is indigenous. 

But as bad as this picture is, it is not even the full story. In most Muslim-dominated states, Fridays have equally been appropriated as part of the weekend work-free days. Where it is not expressly so, workers at best work half-day, leaving for home after the Jumu’ah Prayer (Friday prayer).

And true to prediction, Governor Umar Namadi of Jigawa State, on Tuesday, extended the Eid-el-Kabir holiday to Friday. A statement by his head of service, Alhaji Hussaini Ali Kila, said: “The Jigawa State Government has declared Friday, June 30, 2023 work free day in commemoration of this year’s Eid-el-Kabir celebration.”

In neighbouring Katsina, one of the most educationally backward states in Nigeria, Governor Dikko Umar Radda declared a one-week holiday for primary and secondary school students for the Sallah celebration. In Kano, the Education Ministry announced a Sallah break for all day and boarding public/private primary and post-primary schools in the state, commencing Friday, June 23.

Truth be told, even in those states where no public announcements were made, particularly in the North, the working week ended Tuesday. It will even be a struggle to drag some back to work on Monday.

When these ceremonies fall on weekends, the nearest weekday is quickly appropriated as a public holiday. Since it has become a convention that a minimum of two days must be used in celebration, if the ceremonies fall on a Saturday and Sunday, then Monday and Tuesday are sacrificed on the country’s hedonistic altar.

For instance, many of the public holidays that fell on weekends in 2022 were celebrated on weekdays. New Year’s Day, January 1, was a Saturday but January 3, was declared New Year Day holiday; May 1, a Sunday was Labour Day but May 2 – Monday – was Labour Day holiday; June 12 – Sunday –  was Democracy Day but June 13 – Monday – became Democracy Day holiday; Sunday, July 10 and Monday, July 11 were days for the 2022 Eid-el-Kabir but the holiday was extended to Tuesday, July 12; the holiday for October 1, which fell on a Saturday was celebrated on Monday, October 3;  October 8, 2022, was the date for Id el Maulud but because that was a Saturday, Monday, October 10 was declared a holiday; and Christmas Day in 2022 fell on a Sunday and Tuesday, December 27 became Christmas Day holiday.

This is ridiculous, particularly against the backdrop that on public holidays major economic activities are automatically shut down – all financial institutions, schools, and government offices go on break.

The bigger tragedy is that even as many think that we already have too many work-free days in a country where, ideally, every hour of the 365 days in a year ought to be maximally utilized in productive ventures, some are still clamouring for more.

The ultra-conservative Muslim Ummah are still agitating that the beginning of the Islamic year be declared a public holiday insisting that the Gregorian calendar is a Christian creation. Thus, July 19, 2023, which is the Gregorian date for 1445 AH, the beginning of the 2023 Islamic year should be declared a public holiday. To be sure, some states had already started observing it as a work-free day. Sooner than later, it will become a national holiday.

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It is even worse every election year. In an era when you can hardly know that elections are being held in some countries, including here in Africa, Nigeria is entirely shut down on election days. Many state governors declared work-free days to enable residents register for the 2023 elections and to collect their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), in an election Prof Mahmoud Yakubu-led Independent National Election Commission (INEC) disingenuously rigged beforehand.

Then, throw into the mix the fact that non-state actors like the Mazi Nnamdi Kanu-led Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in the last two years declared every Monday a work-free day in the Southeast, then the absurdity of the problem stares you in the face.

Until Nnamdi Kanu is released from prison, IPOB declared every Monday a sit-at-home day starting from August 9, 2021. A statement by the group’s Media and Publicity Secretary, Emma Powerful, announcing the harebrained policy of the self-determination group said: “We the global family of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)  wish to announce to all Biafra citizens, friends of Biafra and lovers of Biafra freedom and independence that IPOB leadership has declared every Monday ‘a ghost Monday’.

“This declaration takes effect from Monday, August 9, 2021. From that day Biafra land will be on lockdown every Monday from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm until our leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, who was unlawfully abducted in Kenya and illegally detained by the federal government of Nigeria is released.

“Nobody should attempt to flout this directive as doing so may come with huge consequences. Anybody flouting this order is taking a grave risk.”

And, indeed, it came with fiendish consequences for innocent people whose only crime was daring to eke out a living for their families on Mondays. It is so bad that even when IPOB disavowed the “ghost Monday” farce, it has become a permanent feature in the Southeast calendar because many are yet to recover from their tragic experiences and even Southeast governors are observing it religiously even as they talk tough.

As if that is not bad enough, IPOB has also extended the “ghost days” to any day Nnamdi Kanu is billed to appear in court, his birthday, etc.

So, why these many work-free days? None of the two religions – Christianity and Islam – pushing that every of the 365 days be declared a public holiday is indigenous. They are foreign religions and not even in the Arabian Peninsula and Israel where they originated are so many man-hours wasted as work-free days in the name of religion.

In the developed climes of Europe and North America, no one can afford such luxury. For instance, in the United Kingdom, there are only eight bank holidays (public holidays), that the public receives as days off work, per calendar year: New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, May Day, late May Bank Holiday, Summer Bank Holiday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. The United States recognizes 12 federal holidays and in Canada, there are 10 paid general holidays every year.

These incessant work-free days in Nigeria are ill-advised. The wasted man-hours are unquantifiable and the economy is worse for it. The public holidays are too many and unconscionable, needless and counter-productive and must be reduced if Nigerian leaders are serious about jumpstarting the economy and revving the engine of production and development. Holidays that fall on weekends should be celebrated on such days. No country desirous of productivity can afford to deliberately put her people out of work in the name of religious ceremonies as Nigeria does. The idea of unending public holidays is not only absurd but also sickening.