To understand the profligacy, indiscretion and misplaced priority in the purchase of N1.14 billion ($2.7 million) –worth of 10 luxury vehicles by the Muhammadu Buhari government for neighbouring Niger Republic, ostensibly to shore up that country’s security, at a time when there is excruciating hunger in the land and terrorists are probably a mile away from the Aso Villa seat of government, you have to go way back to the year 1972 or so, to the reply of the late president of Niger Republic, Ahmadu Diori, when asked why Niger supported Nigeria as against secessionist Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War. According to Diori, as quoted by Temitope Ola in ‘Nigeria’s assistance to African states: What are the benefits?’ in the International Journal of Development and Sustainability, Niger depended on Nigeria for her economic survival. In his direct words, made in French, Diori had said: “Quand le Nigeria etermue, le Niger fact plus qu’attraper la grippe, il se trouvedeja a l’hopital” meaning, “when Nigeria sneezes, Niger not only catches a cold, it is already on admission in the hospital”.

While government justifies the vehicle purchase as a continuation of Nigeria’s national foreign policy, with its central focus on Africa, this has afforded Nigerians the opportunity to dig into the details of the so-called foreign policy. In the process, we found out that as irresponsibly profligate as the Buhari government’s vehicle purchase is at this time of national economic pains at home, profligacy and irresponsible spending has, since independence, hallmarked successive Nigerian governments’ national and foreign policies. This recklessness confirms the flip side of that popular aphorism that though Rome was not built in a day, Rome was also not destroyed in a day as well. Not only didn’t the prostrate and lamentable state that Nigeria currently finds herself begin today, Buhari, a known defender of his Fulani ethnicity, at the expense of Nigeria, was led into taking such a reprehensible action based on a Nigerian governmental pedigree of wastage.

According to January 30, 1970, edition of The New York Times, even after a ruinous, brutal and destructive civil war, Nigeria’s economic structure and promise remained almost unscathed. After about $1 billion was spent on prosecuting the needless civil war, Nigeria must have been one of the few countries in the world which fought an intra-national war for three years without any known record of indebtedness. With an economy managed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, an astute manager of men and resources, Times reported that Nigeria adopted the “cash and carry” method for her arms and ammunition procurement. More astoundingly, she didn’t have to draw down on her foreign currency reserves which, pre-war, stood at $400 million.

Oil, discovered just before the war and comfortably padded by a fairly widespread export portfolio of cocoa, groundnuts, tin, rubber, timber and a “$30 million or so” which was in the hands of the marketing boards and private firms, kept the economy bubbling, even while the armaments of war zoomed in the air. With an oil production capacity which, as Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu declared secession in May 1967, was soaring at 570,000 barrels a day, Nigeria literally didn’t touch her oil during the war so much that by 1968, production had plummeted to 50 barrels a day. This rose to a record 550,000 barrels a day immediately after the war, with royalties and taxes netting an annual $100 million and which, in 1975, rose to $1 billion from oil companies.

Armed with hugely humongous oil wealth, a vast population and the mantra that a Nigerian was in five blacks gathered anywhere in the world, as the street lingo says, these soon “entered Nigeria’s head,” and the thought that the country could be an African superpower became a near-national ideological obsession. Between 1967 and 1977, federal government revenue was said to have soared by 2,200%. Nigeria’s economy was so strong that, on January 1, 1973, the country abandoned its pound sterling currency, a colonial relic, and created a Naira currency. Nigeria was managed by an exuberant crop of unaccountable military leaders who had scant leadership and economic training. The height of it was Gowon’s infamous statement abroad in 1973 that Nigeria’s problem was not money but how to spend it. The huge oil wealth was soon quashed on the altar of naivety, arrogance and knavery.

Going on foreign junkets became a pastime of the nouveau riche military elite and a consumerist pattern driven by an obsession with foreign goods. This grossly contradicted a budding ideology of a people who professed an African superpower. General Gowon, like Muhammadu Buhari, publicly known for his terse thirst for personal corruption, became a breeding pond for blood-of-the-country-sucking sharks dressed in military epaulettes. The governors began a mania of infrastructure driven more by an opportunistic craving to collect kickback from contractors than the need for development. It became so bad that in 1975, the Gowon government had placed accumulated order for 20 million tonnes of cement, paid for by Nigeria’s buoyant petro-dollars. The cost of the mind-boggling cement orders was put at about $2 billion, an amount which was a quarter of Nigeria’s oil revenue in 1975. This order was at the time more than the cement capacity of Europe and the USSR combined. Apapa was thoroughly overwhelmed and shipping lines all over the world scurried to Nigeria to take a bite of the raw, mindless orgy of profligacy. Most of the shipments entered demurrage in what was infamously dubbed the Cement Armada. It was so bad that when Murtala Muhammed took over from Gowon in a sudden coup and set up a panel to investigate the 12 governors under him, only two of them and two other ministers were found to be blameless.

The petro-dollar El-Dorado was so hugely provoked that every rural dweller in Nigerian villages wanted to migrate to the city. Prostitution statistics rose tremendously as did crimes. Girls became willing liaisons to soldiers in whose hands hid the famous dollars from oil exploration and their civil servant accomplices. Between 1970 and 1976, statistics revealed an upsurge in criminal activities due to the craze to take a bite of petro-dollars. An approximate 900% increase in incidences of armed robbery was recorded, with 12,153 reported cases in 1970. This figure soared to 105,859 in 1976. Executions of robbers, codified in federal and state laws, went on the upswing. The capital punishment for armed robbery could however not deter the spate of robberies because the petro-dollar gains accruable from the crime outweighed the risk of being caught.

It was easy for the exuberant military leaders, many of them in their 20s and 30s, some of whom were bachelors, like General Jack, the head of state himself, to extend the spatial control mentality of military psychology into governance. They easily keyed into the African superpower near-national ideological obsession and began to spend like Father Christmas, in the service of a foreign policy they devised, which was woven around Africa as the centre-piece. This cost Nigeria heavily.

Thus, in 1972, as reported by Ola, Nigeria signed a pact with the Niger Republic to supply her 30,000 kilowatts of electricity from the Kanji Dam hydroelectricity, even when local electricity needs were not met. Again in 1974, Nigeria donated millions of naira-worth of relief materials to the same Niger when it was ravaged by drought. After the widespread Soweto massacre riots of 1976, Nigeria brought into the country hundreds of “Soweto kids” and several other South African black youths and offered them scholarships to study in Nigerian universities. This continued to the end of apartheid. Nigeria also established a South Africa Relief Fund (SARF) in 1978 which Nigerians poured about $20 million of their hard-earned money. In June 1976, according to Ola, General Obasanjo presented a cheque of $250,000 to the liberation forces of Rhodesia through Mozambiquan foreign minister, Joaquim Chissano, in Mauritius during the OAU summit. Quoting General Joe Garba, Ola also reported that on April 25, 1976, Obasanjo handed over to President Samora Machel of the newly independent state of Mozambique the sum of $1.6 million as development assistance.

Nigeria also did this Father Christmas in her negotiation with and sale of a concessionary 90-day crude oil to South Africa, Namibia, Ghana, Niger and other African countries. Ghana and Togo owed the country over $30 million from the exercise. The Big Father Xmas also constructed an expressway from Lagos to the outskirts of Cotonou with several millions of dollars while spearheading the integration project of a regional gas pipeline for the sub-regional economic development. Nigeria equally established the Technical Aid Programme and created a Trust Fund at AfDB for Africans with a soft loan of $100 million left in the bank to be lent to least developing African countries.

In 1989, upon the paralysis of the Beninoise government by a bludgeoning workers’ strike occasioned by its inability to pay salaries, Nigeria, under Babangida, offset the salaries while also donating 12,000 tonnes of petroleum products to the government. The year before, Babangida’s Nigeria funded the Ibrahim Babangida School of International Studies in Liberia and donated seven Nigerian academics to its institution while Nigeria constructed the Trans-African Highway and bought over Liberia’s debt valued at $30 million. There must have been a-thousand-and-one other frittering off of the Nigerian wealth which took place undercover which are not open to the rest of the world, all in the name of foreign policy. For instance, as of 2009, Nigeria had sent about 3,000 troops to Darfur for the AU peacekeeping force. President Obasanjo also sent 5,000 Nigerian soldiers on peacekeeping operations. Also, Nigeria’s mediation and conciliation efforts in Angola, Chad, Congo, Cote D’Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, etc ate deep into the country’s treasury.

There have been several arguments from international relations scholars who aver that not being an island unto herself, Nigeria cannot but assist other nations, especially the ones that surround her. This argument is further bolstered by the fact that Nigeria herself receives huge assistance from developed countries of the world. However, Nigeria’s foreign policy has been left so much to the whims of the executive arm of government which then drives it according to the personal mindset of the head of the arm. It is why a cronyist like Buhari will capitalize on this unwholesome pedigree of Nigerian leadership to fritter money abroad in building a road into his Niger ancestral home, spend billions of Nigerian money on the tiny African country, and legitimize it by citing Nigeria’s national foreign policy. President Obasanjo and General Babangida, for instance, squandered Nigeria’s national wealth so unconscionably during their stay in office on what will appear as a mythical brotherhood relations policy, without corresponding benefits accruable to the country. Many of those countries on whom Nigeria squandered her national resources that could have been saved to build a today for her children demonize Nigeria and Nigerians today on account of the social and economic calamities that result, partly from such mindless donations and investments in their countries that were made decades ago. Nigerians today face xenophobic attacks from South Africans, for whose today we cleaned our treasury yesterday.

Almost as if it was perforating the thesis I have been sermonizing about since the beginning of this piece, on the scene emerged an alumnus of the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, MBBS Class of 1985, Dr Philip Ozuah who donated the sum of $1,000,000 to a hostel building fund project of the college last week. The news nearly blocked the social media airwave. In an earlier discussion of Nigeria’s Father Christmas role in Africa that I had with some persons, I was asked, put beside Ozuah’s gesture, what difference exists between Nigeria and Dr Ozuah, both having helped their needy ecosystem?

In some way, you could also throw Tobi Amusan into this mix. Amusan is the 25-year-old athlete who made history last week by winning the 100 metres hurdles gold at the World Athletics Championship.

Rather than counterpoise Nigeria in terms of similarity, I think what both Ozuah and Amusan did for Nigeria is what Leo Tolstoy called Loss as the elder brother of Gain. I explain: At a time, we thought our Loss was the national morale that had sagged badly in Nigeria, both in individual Nigerians’ willingness to intervene in the affairs of the other person or intervention in matters that affect the collective. Also, at a time when we thought that the name of Nigeria could never inspire anything good in the world, Amusan and Ozuah dismantled this mindset by presenting themselves as our Gain. In the words of Bob Marley, in his ‘Trenchtown’ track, Ozuah and Amusan both made Nigeria/Nigerians find “our (national) bread in desolate places,” among a world that asked, “can anything good come out Of (Nigeria) Trench Town?”

However, Ozuah and Amusan haven’t totally erased the fact that Nigeria is still a desolate place. If you listened to the maiden Channels TV interview granted by Festus Keyamo, the national publicity secretary of the APC and his haughty pee on the graves of Nigerians who died and are still dying as a result of Buhari’s effeminate fight against terrorists, or his cavalier dismissal as inconsequential and the over-simplification of the almost half a year stay at home by our university children, you cannot but conclude that though brains similar to Keyamo’s, since 1960, have profligately driven Nigeria back, the Amusan and Ozuahs demonstrate that even inside the tunnel, we can have the light shine.

“Democracy is a journey and the quality of the ride depends on what we collectively put into it. If we shut our ears and our eyes, the ship of state could derail…” Dennis Odife in ‘Without Money and Without Price: A Brief Autobiography’, p.196 (2016)

In court around July 1, 2022, the chief judge of Akwa Ibom state in south-south Nigeria, Ekaette Obot, repeatedly threatened to jail my good friend, Inibehe Effiong, for his diligence in representing an unknown client against two powerful men – the governor who appointed her into office and a senator without whose influence she probably may also not have been in office.

Four weeks later, on July 27, she fulfilled her wish committing him to jail for one month at a whim before proceeding on vacation. The judge did this notwithstanding that there was pending before her “a motion….to disqualify and recuse himself (herself) from the case on grounds of bias or likelihood of bias”. At no point did the judge tell Inibehe what his crime was nor did she give him an opportunity to defend himself as he is entitled to.

The president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has gone on record to say that the course of conduct chosen by the judge against Inibehe “not only runs afoul of known practice and procedure in such cases but is also unconstitutional”. Other lawyers have described her conduct as judicial malpractice.

Madam Chief Judge may enjoy her momentary schadenfreude, but Africa’s history suggests those who abuse the rule of law – whether they be executive, parliamentary or judicial officers – in the way she has chosen to do almost invariably live to reap the whirlwind in more ways than one. A few illustrations may drive home the point.

As French West Africa prepared for De Gaulle’s self-rule referendum in 1957, Ernest Boka was one of the most promising stars in the region’s politics. In his native Côte d’Ivoire, Boka was eclipsed in popularity only by Felix Hophouët-Boigny, the wealthy Baoulé Chief who was the first black person to be appointed minister in France. Born in 1928, 23 years younger than Hophouët, Boka was a bright lawyer who appeared destined for greatness. At just 28 in 1957, he became chief of staff to the governor-general, before rising from 1958 to 1959 to ministerial portfolios, first in education and then public service. As independence approached in 1960, Boka was one of the leaders of Houphouët-Boigny’s Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), who strong-armed other platforms from the contest, enabling Houphouët to emerge unopposed as Côte d’Ivoire’s president.

As Boka’s reward, Houphouët appointed him Côte d’Ivoire’s first supreme court president in 1960, where he initially proved to be a trusted believer. But Boka was always a man of the people with socialist sympathies. At 35, in March 1963, Ernest Boka resigned as supreme court president. Shortly thereafter, in August 1963, he was among hundreds rounded up under the direction of Houphouët-Boigny for allegedly plotting to kill the president with juju. A special security court sentenced 19 to life terms and condemned another six to death.

But Ernest Boka did not live long enough to stand trial. His lifeless body was found hanging from the ceiling of his cell in Abidjan bearing marks consistent with torture. In response to strong rumours that Boka’s death was not suicide, Houphouët-Boigny himself called foreign diplomats and correspondents to a briefing in April 1964 at his presidential palace for what turned out to be a trial of a dead man. At the briefing, Houphouët announced that Ernest Boka had confessed to an attempt to use juju to assassinate the president. As evidence, Houphouët-Boigny, a practising Catholic, produced two suitcases containing an assortment of magic potions, dried remains of dead animals and a collection of puny coffins reportedly seized from Ernest Boka’s family house.

About the time Ernest Boka was being liquidated in Côte d’Ivoire, a lowly court clerk and interpreter was working his way into reckoning in Spain’s African plantation in Equatorial Guinea. Francisco Macias Nguema was famous for allowing financial inducements to dictate the content of his translations. As one of few locals with a facility in Spanish, the colonialists came to hang on his every word, mistaking him for a man of influence. In one year between 1966 and 1967, Macias rose from assistant interpreter to become mayor, then minister for public works before becoming deputy president of the governing council. When the gong sounded for independence in 1968, he was well placed to be installed as Equatorial Guinea’s first president on October 12, 1968.

But Macias was unwell and given to outbursts of paranoia and violence fueled by dependence on tropical hallucinogens. Six months after being installed as president, in March 1969, he personally bludgeoned his foreign minister to death before having opposition leader, Bonifacio Ondo Edu, abducted from exile in neighbouring Gabon and executed. A reign of terror ensued during which Equatorial Guinea’s small population of professionals, including lawyers and judges were either killed or exiled. Rules were dismantled. With no judges, regime enemies were tried and executed by youth militias organised and administered by Macias’ nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema M’ba N’Zogo, an army lieutenant-colonel.

On August 3, 1979, Teodoro Obiang toppled his uncle and had him put on trial for mass atrocities, including genocide and embezzlement. As there were no judges left in the country nor lawyers to defend accused persons, the trial was conducted in a cinema hall by militias of precisely the same sort whom Macias used as president to liquidate his enemies, both real and imagined. Macias’ fate was predictable. On September 29, 1979, the militia found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Hours after his predicted condemnation, an elite military unit flown in specially from Morocco executed him by firing squad at the Black Beach Prison in Malabo.

Two years after Macias’ death, on Christmas Eve in 1981, the government of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda abducted Malawi’s exiled, first attorney general and justice minister, Orton Chirwa, and his wife, Vera, from Zambia and returned them to Lilongwe. Orton Chirwa was the founding president of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), which led Malawi to independence in 1964. He was also Malawi’s first lawyer.

As a minister in the transitional government in 1962, Orton took issue with the presumption of innocence and burdens of proof in criminal trials, arguing for their replacement with traditional African norms and institutions. As attorney general, he pushed for these reforms but was turfed out of the cabinet in September 1964 in a power tussle with Banda, his successor as MCP resident before they were promulgated. Following the collapse of the Chilobwe Murder trials in 1969, Banda scrapped criminal trials by regular courts, transferring jurisdiction over crimes to so-called traditional courts, comprising a traditional chief as chair, with three citizen assessors and one lawyer. The traditional court system was appointed by Banda, who was both president and justice minister. They also reported to him.

In an ironic twist of fate, Orton would be arraigned for treason in 1983 before the kind of traditional courts he had advocated for as attorney general. His trial was a charade. The court denied him and his wife – herself also Malawi’s first female lawyer – legal defence or the right to call witnesses. Initially sentenced to death on conviction, Banda commuted this to life imprisonment. Orton spent the remainder of his life in solitary confinement at the Zomba Prison in Malawi where, in December 1992, he died at the age of 73.

As Nigeria’s military ruler from 1985 to 1993, Ibrahim Babangida eviscerated the courts, mostly precluding them by military decree from jurisdiction over whatever his regime did. In 1991, he issued a special decree making legal proceedings against his regime a felony punishable with up to two years’ imprisonment. Out of power in 2001, a successor regime asked him to appear before a commission of inquiry to defend his record.

Rather than do that, the man who made going to court a crime hired a coterie of highly prized lawyers to go to court and question the powers of an elected civilian administration to ask him to account. The case ended up before a supreme court presided over by judges, some of whose judicial careers Babangida had advanced. The result was jurisprudence that set back the powers of the federal government and the safety and security of Nigeria.

Africa’s history has firm lessons for powerful men and women who want to get ahead by retarding the legal process through abuse of the sacred trust of upholding the rule of law. The biggest argument for defending and preserving the rule of law is self-interest –000000000 those who degrade it often end up in need of it, usually to save them against their own temporary collaborators.

Karma has a brutal sense of humour.

One thing is assured: Inibehe Effiong is a courageous, vigorous and brilliant advocate who is destined to become a phenomenon in Nigeria’s legal profession. Ekaette Obot will live long enough to see that destiny fully realized. That is the least we can pray for.

I watched the minister of state for Labour and employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN) on Politics today, with Seun Okinbaloye, on Friday, August 6, 2022, and he made several claims, the most outrageous being that Peter Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, has more executive experience and capacity than Waziri Atiku Abubakar, the Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party
His exact words were:

“Atiku Abubakar has never held any government position where he makes the final call. He was Vice President, he was not the chief executive. He was never governor. He was never anything. Even Peter Obi is ahead of Atiku Abubakar. Peter Obi is ahead of him in terms of capacity to make decisions. So how are we going to hand over the country to somebody who has never shown the capacity. Who has never held a position where he makes the final call?”It may be that Mr. Keyamo is faced with selling such a bad product as Bola Tinubu, a man who voluntarily entered into a drug assets forfeiture plea bargain with the US Department of Justice, and who has multiple questions on his source of wealth, real identity, and educational qualifications, that he is doing the next best thing, de-marketing his main rival. 

Festus Keyamo also says some other things in praise of Bola Tinubu, however, he is wrong in his postulations for the following reasons: 

1. It is not true that Vice Presidents do not have executive experience and capacity, to the extent where they have the final call. At least in Nigeria and the United States. By virtue of Section 153 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended, the Vice President has final executive control and capacity over the National Economic Council. 
2. As a matter of fact, Atiku Abubakar headed the National Economic Council during the Obasanjo years. The National Economic Council comprises of the Vice President os the Executive Chairman, and the 36 state Governors, as well as the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. 
3. At the time they Atiku Abubakar headed the National Economic Council, Bola Tinubu, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, and Peter Obi were all members and sat UNDER him. In other words Atiku was their boss. 
4. Not only was Atiku Abubakar the boss of these bosses (Tinubu, Kwankwaso, and Obi), but he also led the National Economic Council at a time when Nigeria paid off all her foreign debts to the Paris Club and other Bretton Woods institutions, meaning that not only does he have experience, but his experience is good. 
5. Atiku Abubakar was also the Chairman of the National Council of Privatisation, which is a statutory body and he thrived in that position. Meaning that he also has further executive experience that is positive. 
6. It would be recalled that Atiku Abubakar stood in for then President Obasanjo on multiple occasions. One of such occasions was on July 10, 2003, when the Governor of Anambra, Chris Ngige was abducted while then President Obasanjo had traveled and then Vice President Atiku Abubakar was in charge. In an interview with ThisDay newspapers on August 16, 2020, Chris Ngige revealed how Atiku Abubakar ordered Tafa Balogun, the then Inspector General of Police, to restore him to power. What will Festus Keyamo call that, if not executive authority? This is the same executive authority that enabled Vice President Yemi Osinbajo sack the Director General of the Department of State Security, Lawal Daura, on August 7, 2018. 
7. And although it is fallacious to say that Waziri Atiku Abubakar has no executive experience, let us for the sake of argument condescend to Keyamo’s pedestrianism. How much executive experience did Kennedy, Obama, and Trump have before going on to be President? None. Yet, they performed. 
8. Keyamo said Tinubu increased Lagos’s IGR. True. But much more than that, Tinubu increased Lagos’s debt. Tinubu met a debt of less than $200 million and left a debt of billions of dollars. Lagos alone owes 6% of Nigeria’s external debt and approximately 4% of her domestic debt. Tinubu’s debt overshot his IGR, which is a net loss for Lagos. Besides, with AlphaBeta, are we sure the IGR got to the coffers of the Lagos Government, or to private hands? 
9. Furthermore, Keyamo averred that Tinubu Is a good head hunter. How can that be true when he was responsible for head hunting Buhari? How can that be true when he brought in Ambode and fought with him? How can that be true when the electorate rejected his hand picked Governor in Osun and he lost the state to the PDP? 
10. If, as Keyamo said, Tinubu is a good manager of men and resources, then how come he is the first governor of the Fourth Republic to have fought with two of his own hand picked deputy Governors and instigated their impeachments? 
11. Tinubu promised to continue with Buhari’s good works. Can he mention those good works? A man who wants to continue where Buhari stopped is definitely not the right choice for Nigerians. 

But besides the above, how can the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, be on strike for a record period, and the minister who is supposed to solve this national emergency, Festus Keyamo, has left his station to promote Bola Tinubu’s campaign? If this administration was serious, Keyamo should have been laser focused on the ASUU strike. 
His obsession with promoting Bola Tinubu at the cost of his responsibilities as minister of state for labour is another reason why the ASUU strike would not be solved any time soon and will move from an emergency to a crisis. This administration, and Keyamo, are more interested in politicking than in governing. 
That is why Keyamo has left his place of primary assignment to become the Senior advocate of the progenitor of the gospel of Agbado and Cassava. 
Dear citizens of Nigeria, if you love your children, if you want ASUU strikes to be a thing of the past, then vote out a government that met Nigeria as the third fastest growing economy in the world, according to CNNMoney, and has now turned her into the world headquarters for extreme poverty for the last five years.

Atiku Abubakar has a private university that has NEVER gone on strike. Vote for him and he will do for our public university, what he has done for his personal university. 

President Muhammadu Buhari recently gave a 2-weeks ultimatum, which has since expired, for the negotiating parties to resolve the Federal Government-ASUU imbroglio. Some of us who had been in the educational sector long enough and had witnessed the aberrations knew it was a tall order and more fittingly, an impossible condition. This is not because the matter cannot be resolved in less than two weeks but because it was clearly discernible that the parties involved and other stakeholders in university education have not been telling ourselves the bitter truth. The closest to uprightness was the statement by the Honourable Minister of Labour that the Federal Government does not have the funds to meet its obligations in the agreement signed with the Unions, and that the country is broke. How else can one explain a 2009 agreement that is still begging for implementation in 2022? What is the assurance that a follow-up agreement in 2022 will be implemented before another 13 years (2035), if the prevailing conditions remain unaltered?

I struggled within me in deciding whether to send my modest suggestions covertly to the major parties involved or put it in the public domain. I have however come to the conclusion that it will serve greater public good with the latter approach since virtually all Nigerians are stakeholders. The unwary public has the right to know what is responsible for this seemingly intractable challenge, the ultimate solution and what should be their role in resolving the issues. It is embarrassing that the current ASUU strike which began on 14th February, 2022 has again been “rolled over” for another 4 weeks. Other staff Unions on our campuses (SSANU, NASU and NAAT) have not fared better. The last ASUU strike in 2020 lasted for nine months and from all indications, the current strike may last longer. Must we continue this way? Is incessant strike the solution to the decadence in the educational system? Have the strikes been effective or of any overall benefit to the stakeholders? The answer to all these questions is ambiguous and clearly dependent on the side to which the individual belongs.

ASUU embarked on the current strike to press home its demands for; the renegotiation of the ASUU/FGN 2009 agreement, deployment of UTAS to replace IPPIS, release of the reports of Visitation panels to federal universities, funding for revitalization of public universities, earned academic allowances, poor funding of State Universities and promotion arrears. I have not been privileged to read the Nimi Briggs Report but snippets in the newspapers and other information outlets indicate that a major part of the report is increment in salary. Nigerian lecturers are now the poorest paid in Africa and it is obvious that such a system can never retain the best. We know from the Minister of Labour, Employment and Productivity, Dr. Chris Ngige, that the Nimi Briggs Committee proposed “109 to 185 per cent increase in the University wage structure”, and that “the Federal Government will incur an additional N560 billion as salaries alone”. The Minister has opined that negotiating with ASUU without simultaneously doing so with other university-based unions only delays the strike as it would not achieve a quick resolution of the issues. The Minister at several fora has also declared that Nigeria is broke (saying the obvious!) and that the Federal Government does not have the funds to meet its obligations in the agreement signed with the Unions. He has therefore called for renegotiation of the terms of the Agreement with ASUU, in the effort to end the ongoing strike by University staff.

If we continue this way, the negotiations are unlikely to record any significant achievement.

Emeritus Professor Nimi Briggs (Pro-Chancellor, Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike Ikwo), chairing the current negotiating Panel and other members of the panel are reputable and highly revered individuals with very deep insight of university education. They have over the years proven their devotion and total commitment to the growth and development of higher education in the country. However, the fact remains that they have to work within the ambit of their terms of reference. The Committee inaugurated on March 7, 2022 had three months to conclude the renegotiation of the 2009 FGN/ASUU agreement and, as expected, it submitted its report on schedule. However, the efforts of the 7-member renegotiating team now appear to be inadequate in resolving the present impasse, reopening our universities and keeping our campuses functional. It will be necessary to know the suggestions proffered by the Renegotiating Committee on how the Federal Government would source the funds to meet the proposed salary increase.

Another major grouse of ASUU and the other staff Unions with the Federal Government is the introduction of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS). The IPPIS is domiciled in the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF). The IPPIS project, which commenced in 2007, centralises the payment of salaries and wages directly to the bank accounts of all federal government employees in Nigeria. It is one of the major issues that led to the 9-month strike by the ASUU in 2020, and the follow-up industrial actions by SSANU and NASU early in 2021. The challenges of IPPIS are enormous for all stakeholders and especially for the Universities. Due to the peculiarities of the Universities, there are major challenges with the use of IPPIS. Most of these are, to all extent and purposes, human problems. The scheme has become an albatross bedeviling the tertiary education system in the country, and further undermining the autonomy earlier enjoyed by the Universities. Interestingly, while the Unions are agitating, University administrators are lukewarm about the use of IPPIS because it has shifted the heat and agitations on salaries and wages from the campuses to Abuja. Instead of ASUU insisting on the use of University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), and the Joint Action Committee of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) marketing the University Peculiar Payroll Payment System (U3PS), relocating and shedding the control of IPPIS for Federal Universities to the National Universities Commission (NUC) will be a fair compromise. My opinion!

The peculiarities of the University system (such as sabbatical leave, appointment of expatriate staff and other practices necessary to internationalize and make a university world-class can then be continuously built into the IPPIS software domiciled in NUC. It could ideally be referred to as IPPIS-U. I do not expect ASUU to agree with this suggestion just as I also would not expect the Federal Government to concur. This is because ASUU is known to fight “until the last man” for a just cause and on the part of the Federal Government, egos of those who have maintained the “IPPIS or nothing” stance may be bruised. However, for the sake of the system and to bring some stability to our universities it appears to me to be the best solution and gladiators must at this point sheath their swords. The unending expectation of a positive outcome from the integrity test by the National Information Technology and Development Agency (NITDA) for both UTAS and U3PS should be a source of worry to all Nigerians. We have had enough of IPPIS politics! No software, no matter how robust, would eliminate the negative factors identified with IPPIS, particularly if some of the operators are attuned to selfish and dishonest pursuits, and offenders are not severely and promptly punished. The very best financial accountability software in the world can
always be compromised but such occurrences are minimized where and when there are active deterrents.

It is time for the stakeholders in the education sector to now come to “reason together” and stop acting in silos and fiefdoms. Government must declare an emergency in the education sector and all critical stakeholders must now dialogue, and come to amicable and reasonable solution. Truth be told, this is not the time for negotiations spanning months, it smirks of insincerity or failure to grasp the enormity of the problem. While not ignoring the letter and spirit of the Trade Dispute Act on resolution of industrial actions, I will propose that the Government conveys an expanded assembly of critical stakeholders, and not just the Ministries and the Unions, to deliberate and take critical decisions that will move the education sector forward, and ensure that our students, who have been at home for five months, resume immediately. The meeting should have representatives of; the core Ministries (Education, Labour, Finance, and Science and Technology), the staff Unions (ASUU, SSANU, NASU and NAAT), the students, National Salaries and Wages Commission, Head of Service of the Federation, Accountant-General of the Federation, and the Tertiary Education Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Federal Ministry of Education/National Universities Commission should coordinate the meetings which ideally should be chaired by the Minister of Education. If discussions at such a forum is open and sincere, it will be possible to chart a new course for University education in the country and forestall any future strikes and closure of our higher institutions. We all know the truth but, we must now allow the truth to set us free.

A quick background information on the current financial contribution of students in our Federal Universities will shed some light on the insincerity pervading the system. Allow me to use Obafemi Awolowo University as an example. The students still pay N90, with N2,500 maintenance fees, per session for accommodation even in situations where the session extends beyond 12 months. The N90 is the same amount I paid as a student in the same University in the 1970s. The cost of the receipt issued for the payment is probably more than the amount paid and it would have been more “economical” for the university if offered free! The charging of “fees” is not supported by the Federal Government but in OAU, undergraduate student pay ‘’Departmental charges” of N5,000 per session for Arts, N10,000 for Sciences, Social Sciences, Technology and Law, and N15,000 for Medicine and other courses in the Health Sciences. These charges were fixed over 20 years ago and the uproar that followed has ensured that it remained the same.

OAU with a student population of about 25,000 runs an annual Personnel budget of approximately N10 billion. This in essence means N400,000 per student per session will double the personnel budget. Of course, it will be ridiculous to expect that all students must pay the same amount of fees. It may mean payments of between N200,000 and N600,000 per student per session depending on the course. This is nowhere near the N900,000 to N3,000,000 per session that students pay in most private universities today. Students would be charged based on the standard staff-student ratio and the number of lectures per course, with a standard fee fixed for each lecture. A personal experience would suffice. I was in a University in South Africa, as Visiting Professor, in 2002 and the Department could not deliver a lecture because it fell on a Public holiday that was never envisaged. It was the last week of formal lectures, just before the examinations, and the department had to negotiate with the students to find a suitable time.

The students had to be persuaded that the lecture would be beneficial to them and really worth sacrificing their revision time. It was strange to me that lecturers had to plead with students for a lecture to be delivered. My host then explained to me that failure to give the lecture would mean a refund by the Department to the students but that, to him was not the problem. The real challenge was that the next set of students would reject that lecture because it would be deemed as inconsequential and unnecessary, if an earlier set could graduate without it. In Nigeria of today, such a lecture would never be given and it would be rationalized. If students pay for lectures, no matter how minimal, they can boldly and justifiably exercise their right to quality delivery and regularity of the session.

Many would ask, if fees are introduced, what would happen to those who cannot afford the fees? Between 10 and 20 per cent of the fees collected (an estimated one to two billion Naira for OAU) should be set aside for partial or full scholarships to indigent students. While many may want to falsify and lower their status in order to qualify, two or three key criteria such as primary and secondary schools attended (fee-paying or non-fee-paying), loss of parents etc. would easily differentiate indigent students.

As Vice-Chancellor for five years (2017 to 2022), the incarceration of University administration on the issue of fees was quite distressing to me. Even when the students are willing to contribute financially, the staff Unions led by ASUU had always been against the introduction of fees. The Federal Government also insist that the annual appropriation budget had taken care of all necessary expenditure and that 25% of any income generated must even be remitted to the Federal government. In 2020, the National Assembly passed a resolution that Universities should refund Acceptance fees (N20,000 per newly admitted student for OAU). It became a big issue and the University had to refund, even when we had a 9-month extension to the session due to ASUU strike, and the financial situation of the Federal institutions were highly precarious. Also, in October 2019, the University of Maiduguri introduced a modest increment in their charges and were forced to revert to the old charges by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In ordering the University of Maiduguri to suspend the plan to raise the fees imposed, the House of Representatives concluded “Irrespective of the justification that may have informed the decision, either to address operational and managerial realities of the school, such decision is ill-timed, given the desire by the Federal Government, the Borno State Government and well-meaning Nigerians to tackle the educational needs of Borno State and its environs.” A better approach, instead of the outright reversal of the charges, would have been to set up a special fund for Scholarships and Bursaries, for those who may not be able to afford the increment, due to the plight of the people in the North-East. Unfortunately, the prevailing situation in the region in 2019 has now spread to other parts of the country. The University of Benin announced a similar increase in some charges in September 2021 which also had to be reversed. These occurrences are worrisome and confirmatory of our desire in post-oil boom era to have everything for free, including university education.

Some have argued that education is a right and not a privilege, and that funding of education as stipulated in the Nigerian constitution is the responsibility of government and not parents. Must we allow the demise of our public primary and secondary schools, which we have all witnessed, to occur in our public universities? It is deceitful to expect that University education in today’s Nigeria will continue to be free. The evidence and situation on ground does not support such a grandiose illusion. There are currently 217 universities in the country of which only 49 are federal, 57 state, and majority 111 are private. If the Federal universities would survive, we must be sincere enough to admit our prostration and be courageous to take far-reaching decisions. It is possible with the support of all and sundry. We must always remember that strong connections have been established between rising criminality and idle youths. It is dangerous for the country to continue to nurture university students that are wasting away at home, without the slightest idea of a possible date of resumption. We must not forget that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop”. All involved must resolve to end this strike and rapidly chart a better course for the future of university education in the country. I come in peace!