Cloned Nigerian Anchor

Author: Wale Alonge

Tinubu & Tribune: A Union Made in Journalistic Heaven

Tinubu and Tribune share not just alphabetical but homophonic similarity. Tinubu and Tribune spell and sound almost alike. It therefore should not come as a surprise that the two have become a union made in journalistic heaven or hell. Take your pick.

Tinubu has become a gift that keeps on giving to the Tribune brand. It has become the lifeline for the newspaper’s highly gifted crew pf opinion writers. Tinubu has now become a subject of their obsession, a well they can latch on to dip their ink again, and again for their venom-filled pens like a parasitic leech on its host. They return again and again to Tinubu to churn out one negative opinion epistle after another.

In yesterday’s essay by the premier opinion writer in the Tribune, he latched on to four simple words in an arguably President Tinubu’s most articulate exploration of the state of the nation, and the rationale for his painful economic reform policy. In that speech to visiting former presiding officers of the National legislature to the Aso Rock Villa, the president took his guests on a journey into our past failure as a nation, including the mismanagement of the massive oil windfall of the 1970s, and our failure to invest in both our physical and human infrastructure. He spoke about our dilapidated schools, our crumbling infrastructure and the unsustainability of our artificially juiced up forex and oil subsidy. He acknowledged the pain caused by his economic reform policy and urged for patience, understanding and sacrifice for the sake of a better future.

Always looking for cheap materials to meet their writing deadline however, our brother latched on to four of the most insignificant words uttered by the president “no free beer parlour” to write a whole dissertation worthy of performance by the Baba Sala comedy group.

READ ALSO: http://‘Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins,…’

Not surprisingly, on Tuesday, flat out, Seyi Tinubu’s donation to the Borno Flood disaster is the main course. In one of my posts on that ill-advised public donation, I narrated how tone-deaf and incongruous that visit by Seyi Tinubu and his friends and the huge donation was when many states are still scrambling with how to pay the minimum wage. But to spend pages upon pages of vitriol on that subject matter reeks of journalistic overkill and over-dramatization which sadly has become the stock in trade for the Tribune.

Yes, it is absolutely the responsibility and obligation of every responsible journalist to speak truth to power, to hold their feet to fire, and hold them accountable for the awesome power and privilege that come with their leadership position. But the best journalists in the trade are careful not to cross the hallowed line that divides responsible journalism from personal animosity. The Tribune opinion writers in many people’s opinion have not just crossed that line, they have defacated on it.

Gov Zulum (l), Seyi Tinubu (m)

I will say bon appetite to our Tribune brothers. A brotherly word of caution to them however, from the popular Yoruba adage “Epa npa ara re, olonpa aja”. The tick is killing itself while foolishly thinking he was killing its host, the dog. A parasite that gluttonly consumes its host blood, risks killing itself in the process. The most successful parasite in any ecosystem is one that understands the Kenny Roger’s song about the gamblers “ You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you’re sittin’ at the table”.

One hopes that our brothers in the Tribune will not over play their Tinubu-bashing card. That they will know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
and Know when to walk away

READ ALSO:http://We beg bread, they belch beer

09/25/2024
The Gravy Party is Over Folks: Nigerians Must Abandon the Delusion of Riches and Accept The Pain of Economic Transformation
1. This mythology that we are a rich continent because of our abundance of natural resources is a total misunderstanding of the dynamic and seismic revolution taking place in the global economy from a resource extraction, fossil-fuel dependent, industrial model to a knowledge-driven digital model.
Only those economies that invest in their creative human capital will win the race while those who rely on the extraction of raw natural resources like we do face the natural resource curse and a future filled with pain and grounding poverty. One of the reasons, Tinubu is facing a lot of resistance and backlash is that he is dealing with a country that is still suffering the delusion of riches when it is infact a pathetically poor country, with 17th century infrastructure, primitive and near comatose manufacturing sector, with an economy built around the extraction and export of crude oil.

Until we rid ourselves of the delusion that we are a rich country, we will not make a headway in accepting the pain it will take to reform, reposition and leapfront our economy into the 21st century, knowledge-driven digital economy. We already missed out of the industrial revolution. Most of our citizens still engage in open defacation, wiping their asses with corn husks, like we did as kids decades ago with no access to pipe-borne water, nor electricity, problems that were solved over a century ago. Yet we call ourselves a rich country.

Former President Obasanjo is not helping our cause when he engages in the same ostrich with its head in the sand, blame game of externalizing our deeply rooted economy malaise on the west and its multilateral financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.

In a recent speech in Kenya, the former President played the same playbook of blaming external forces for Africa’s economic disaster. He criticized the World Bank, accusing it of misleading African nations through its initiatives.

The stark reality is that no one has forced us to go cap in the hand beggging for bail-out loan from this last resort, out-of-option lending institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. The fault lies with us and our vision-less leaders who wasted our oil windfall of the 70s on frivolities rather than invest it on economic transformational ventures. It is hard to convince the child of a once lucky lottery winner who blew his windfall that the party was over and that his parents are now dirt poor. That is the situation we now find ourselves, especially those of us who grew into adulthood in the heady decade of the 70s, when Gowon told us our problem was not money but how to spend and we went crazy with insane profligacy and wasteful spending.

Now we must face the lean season and we are having a difficult time facing that reality. We have an easy fall guy to blame for all our woes. His name is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Dr. Adewale Alonge is the President and Founder, Africa-Diaspora Partnership for Empowerment & Development (ADPED) Inc. Miami, Florida. www.adped.org
09/13/2024
Arm Your cranial Cavity Against Anti-Tinubu Information Warfare

Whether we admit it or not, there is a fierce information warfare competing to take hold of the jello (our brain) measuring 5.5 x 6.5 x 3.6 inches (about ten tennis balls) sitting in our cranial cavity. It is daily being bombarded by laser beam of misinformation, exaggeration, mis-attribution, propaganda, innuendos, insinuations, deep fake and outright lies. The goal is to manipulate our perception and control our behavior spanning from what we eat, buy, wear, our belief and perception of reality about our institutions and government.

The human brain has not evolved enough to handle its bombardment with so much conflicting information at the same time. That is why confirmation bias has become its default operational model. Confirmation bias is the propensity of the human brain to acquiesce and accept as fact information that comports with and confirms pre-existing bias, no matter how absurd it is.

It is almost as if we are at the early stages of losing our critical and analytical thinking skills. Most of us have surrendered our brains, thoughts and minds to AI generated algorithms to do the thinking for us.

Sadly, the people behind these algorithms have obliged us by manipulating our minds.

So when you read the above headline US Economist | Wednesday August 28, 2024, Economist Cartoons Tinubu Private Jet as Nigerians starve”, what comes to your mind. Did you think that the cartoon in question was released by “US Economist” a news organization or Steve Hanke a right wing Neoconservative economist who served under Ronald Reagan? What social media will not tell is that the latter is true. The entire story is based on a cartoon and about ten to fifteen words on X (formerly Twitter) by Steve Hanke, a John Hopkins professor who has made Tinubu-basing a cottage industry. Yet that story has been picked up by the usual suspects, the Tinubu-Hate group and blown out into a major news headline on Nigerian social media. That is the classic M. O. of propaganda and perception manipulation on social media.

When did it become the fricking (don’t want to be vulgar) business of a White Neocon who probably has not set his feet in Nigeria ever to dictate to our president when he decides to replace the fleet of inoperable flight-unworthy aircraft in the presidential fleet? Of course these same bozos would be the first to castigate us as incompetent brutes should God forbids our president and his cabinet is incinerated in a rickety plane crash like they did when the Iranian president died in the same circumstance.

Yes, these are indeed extremely tough times for our country and our people, but by golly we must not succumb our brains and our sovereignty to malicious outsiders who wish us no good and have contributed to our socio-economic and political downfall.

Sadly, and because fake news and opinion journalism sell, old media newspapers like the Tribune, Punch and Arise TV among other have junked their journalistic pretensions and instead have hired highly talented opinionators (cloaked in the undeserved garbs of Journalists) to peddle beautifully crafted hateful opinions and perception-manipulations.

Let me repeat once more that there is a vicious information warfare to turn the Nigerian citizens against its government and in the process decapitate the Tinubu regime and our hard earned albeit frustrating democracy and turn the ethnic group against one another. Sadly this phenomenon has become a global epidemics. Most national security agencies from the CIA, FBI and M-6 have set up sophisticated anti-propaganda units to confront this menace. It would be criminal negligence if the Nigerian government does not set up similar unit in the country. Fake news have led to ethnic and racial massacres from Bangladesh, to Indian and across Europe. Mischief makers will call it descent into authoritarianism and infringement of the freedom of speech.

Information has been weaponized and no responsible government will sit by indolently while the country security and sovereignty are been threatened by information warriors. Yes, we must defend vigorously defend our fundamental right to freedom of speech, but w will all be risking it all if we allowed evil doers to hide behind the veil of free speech to destabilize our country.

We must jealously guide, armour and insulate your ten tennis ball jello (brain) against the misinformation and outright manipulation.

09/06/2024
Oil is Indeed the Devil’s excrement: It’s Stench Is Choking Up Nigeria

Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the prominent Venezuelan politician and one of the founders of OPEC, in the early 70s called petroleum “the devil’s excrement” that always brings trouble—waste, corruption, consumption: our public services falling apart and debt. How I wish he could wake up from his grave to see the devastation of his native land, Venezuela my homeland, Nigeria, he would shake his head in shock how apt and in fact understated his prediction was.

The stench of oil, specifically, the high price of one of its refined products, petrol, is literally threatening to choke the life out of my ancestral homeland, Nigeria. It has set the country’s social media on fire and threatening to do same to the regime of the newly elected President Tinubu, who removed the corruption-infected oil subsidy scam.

The data below which is making the round on social media compares the selling price for PMS (petrol) across different countries apparently to justify the price hike. Assuming that one can even verify the reliability of this data (there are different grades of PMS in the U.S. for instance, and prices vary from state to state and in fact from one station to another on the same street. Due to local regulation and standards, in Carlifonia petrol can cost twice as what obtains in Texas. The data shows that PMS price in the US is about twice what we pay in Nigeria.

However while the proposed minimum wage in Nigeria is equivalent to $43.75 a month at the current exchange rate of Naira 1600 to a dollar, the minimum wage in the U.S. which also varies from state to state is $7.25 per hour for federal minimum wage for covered nonexempt employees. In Carlifonia the minimum hourly wage hovers around $16. The bottom line is, comparing PMS prices across nations is a meaningless venture.

In many of these countries unlike Nigeria, the public transport infrastructure is so advanced that many people don’t even drive.

With our poor public transport network, the ridiculously low wage in our economy, and our over-dependence on fossil fuel dependent road transportation to move commodities across the nation, the price of PMS is unsustainably high. It is a drag on our economy and a major driver of our high inflation.

Our challenge is that we can’t work our way out of the high price of PMS with the corruption-ridden oil subsidy scam. We have got to increase our refinery capacity. While Dangote coming on stream is a great first step, we cannot depend on another monopoly for the supply of arguably the most critical factor in our economy, petrol and diesel.

By the way as Dangote himself has proclaimed publicly, the refinery wouldn’t have happened without the visionary leadership of Tinubu, himself an oil man having worked in the industry before. We need to give the man Tinubu some credit.

Solving our petrol problem would not be easy nor quick, but we must have some faith in and give this 15 months old presidency time to work through it.

Although, the uninformed has been howling about NNPC acquisition of a major petrol distribution company two years ago, with NNPC poised to be the main distributor for Dangote petrol, this all is making some sense now. The petrol marketers are a powerful cartel which is adept at price manipulation and price gouging. Have you noticed the almost coordinated rolling sale of PMS by different petrol stations in your neighbourhood? Most of them close shop when PMS is available in NNPC stations. With NNPC acquiring more petrol stations and with its exclusive right to Dangote petrol, there is a distinct possibility to finally break the back of the oil marketer cartel. However, more refineries need to come on-stream to address the supply-demand-price equilibrium conundrum in the Nigeria petrol supply chain.

This coupled with massive investment in public transport infrastructure especially rail line and solution to our energy infrastructure, our power generation and distribution infrastructure, the prospect for economic revitalization of our country should improve substantially. However, all of these prospect goes down the tube if we throw the baby out with the bath water out of frustration. If we allow those vested and entrenched interest who have fed fat on our dysfunction andwho wish our country no good to decapitate the Tinubu presidency and our hard earned albeit imperfect and frankly frustrating democracy. Ww cannot allow people to fly the Russian flag again as a form of protest in our country.

We must understand that there can be no gain without pain. We didn’t get to this economic Armageddon in one day and it will take time, pain and sacrifice to dig our way out. We the grown-up who enjoyed the bounties of petrol-dollars in the 70s and who contributed in one way or another to our country’s perilous condition, should complain and whine less and make one last sacrifice to bequeath to our children, grand children and future generation, a country they can at least have an opportunity to salvage. We have made a mess of our country. We have put our parochial tribal interest above the mission of building a strong virile nation. We have complained about corruption until it is our countryman who is caught or it is our turn to dip our hands in the treasury and we end up doing worse than the people we once condemned.

We can heap the blame for global warming and every other problem that confronts our country on Tinubu’s 15-month regime all we want. It won’t solve our problem. Neither him nor anyone possess the magic wand to solve all the problems that have been built up through decades of misgovernance and corruption.

He is not to blame for all the governors mismanaging the huge revenue allocations they are now getting. He is not responsible for the price gouging by the market women and the corruption that has become endemic in the Nigerian moral fabric.

Our problems are multidimensional, multigenerational, of both poor leadership and incorrigible followership.

Our poor leadership is a reflection of us the people. We cannot ask of our leaders that which we the followers neither possess nor can give.

Leadership is a two-way street. Yes, the leaders can set the tone and lead by example but the system sets the limit of what is doable. We have set up a dysfunctional corrupt system, powered by a plagiarized constitution imposed on us by the military, in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country that is constantly engaging self-destructive war of ethno-hegemonic advantage rather than what is best for the country.

Until that system is totally demolished, and Nigerians sit at a round table to decide if they wanted to live together in a harmonious country where common national interest trumps narrow parochial tribal hegemonic supremacist objective, there is little hope for our country.

Those of us who think they can perform miracle within the dysfunctional corrupt, nepotistic system we have created should quit their armchair pontificating business and throw their hat in the ring. Talk is cheap, governing a nation as complicated and dysfunctional as Nigeria is tough. Managing any group of Nigerians is tough as nail. Look at our socio-cultural associations and large families all bedeviled by conflict, power-tripping and divisions. Many Nigerian churches and cultural groups in the U.S. and Europe end up splitting into factors over leadership tussle, many ending up in courts for resolution. So extrapolate that to managing a country like Nigeria where each other ethnic group sees the other as enemy.

Dr. Adewale Alonge is the President and Founder, Africa-Diaspora Partnership for Empowerment & Development (ADPED) Inc. Miami, Florida. www.adped.org

09/04/2024
A critical analysis of President Tinubu’s Post-Protest Speech to the Nation

…the crafters of the speech made a fundamental mistake of relying on the president assuaging the pain of the citizens by regurgitating and enumerating the different policies his government has enacted to ease the pain his reform polices especially the removal of oil subsidy and floating of the forex has caused, when in fact empathy was needed.

Compared to what happened recently in Kenya and the bombastic prediction by the planners of the “EndBadGovernance” protest, President Tinubu and our dear country just dogged a huge bullet. We are very fortunate to have averted what could have been catastrophic conflagration. Our country is still standing, thank God. So it was totally appropriate and expected that the president would address the nation. I listened to the president’s much anticipated speech, this morning as I was heading out to the airport relieved that my flight had not been cancelled by the protest.

It was a beautifully crafted and well delivered speech with the right cadence. It included a laundry list of various policies that have been taken by the president’s government to reposition the economy for sustainable growth and to ease the the pain of some of his critically needed but painful reform policy like the oil subsidy removal. The president also provided the contextual underpinning for some of the painful policies he has had to implement

However, the crafters of the speech made a fundamental mistake of relying on the president assuaging the pain of the citizens by regurgitating and enumerating the different policies his government has enacted to ease the pain his reform polices especially the removal of oil subsidy and floating of the forex has caused, when in fact empathy was needed. As great as some of those policies might be, their impact are probably longer term ame will not address the immediate needs of the populace for relief from the economic Armageddon that confronts them daily as they try to eke a living and survival in an economy that is close to comatose. Presidential speeches are usually not the best forum to discuss arcane complex policies that might not be understood by most citizens especially those who are hurting. What good does a government credit policy for nano and micro-enterprises do for a hungry man?

The president’a speech was ended on the usual empathy, “I feel your pain” piece when it should have been front center from the onset.

The president would have been better served had he started with the “I feel your pain” piece rather than at the end. It would have been great had the president stated the speech with “I heard your message loud and clear”. As your your president, I feel your pain and know daily struggles. While we have done so much to ease your pain, your protest tells us, we need to do more.

The other missing piece in the president’s speech, was the failure of the president to tell the citizens, what he will do differently in response to protest! It would have been great has the president talked about what he would do to reduce the cost of governance, to make his administrative bureaucracy lighter, more nimble and more aligned to the the country’s economic reality and the sacrifice that the citizens have been called up to make. That was a big and regrettable omission in the speech.

Yes, as commander in chief and the chief security officer, it was important that President communicated his commitment to maintaining law and order as mandated by the constitution. But his role as empathizer in chief could have been given more prominence than it was in the speech.

Overall, it was a good speech, timely, much needed and well delivered.

08/04/2024
Government by Cash gifts and palliatives: Ineffectual Tokenism to Citizens’ Miserys

Media report has it that senate President Akpabio recently announced President Tinubu’s approval of 50,000 Naira monthly stipends for 10,000 youths in the Niger Delta area. I hope that news is not true, otherwise it would tone-deafness on steroid. It is a demeaning policy that reduces Nigerian youth to Pavlovian dogs in his classical conditioning experiments who can be taught compliance with food.

Nigerian youths do not need cashgifts, nor bribes, nor tokenisms or palliatives, call it what you like. It is an insult to them. They need an educational infrastructure fit for human learning, not the filthy chicken pens in which they are packed like animals called schools. They need a functioning economy with modern infrastructure that stimulates economic productivity and job creation.

As much as I am a supporter of President Tinubu, his alms-seekers’ pan-handling, hand-out tokenism palliative policy is like putting bandage on a cancerous bedsore. Sharing envelopes of bags of rice might work for vote harvesting during political campaign. It is not a sustainable model for governance. It is demeaning, belittling, insensitive, and an insult to us all.

If today’s protest falls apart like some hope it does because of the suspicion that it may be a misguided ethnic and political conceptualization and branding as “day of rage” as an alleged attempt at upturning the result of a failed presidential bid. It is hoped that President Tinubu and his team see that as a temporary reprieve to give him a chance for course correction and a massive restructuring and pruning down the huge bureaucracy that has become part and parcel of the culture of government by political patronage with layers upon layers of special assistants to special assistants, with no portfolio nor value addition to governance in Abuja and all over the states and local government capitals. It must stop now.

That is low hanging policy shift that does not need any legislative action, just executive order to send the signal to the populace of shared sacrifice and a listening presidency.

The bubbling explosive tension in the country is palpable. You cannot pack megaton of explosive TNT in a hot combustible room and hope and pray that one day it would not detonate and bring down the house.

The time for presidential action is now, not tomorrow. Like the explosion of the pile of ammonia fertilizer which eviscerated blocks upon blocks of Beirut taking with it the homes of the poor, the powerless the rich and powerful, will be a child’s play unless decisive action is taken is to avert the looming catastrophe.

Our country is siting on a huge pile of TNT that is on the verge of explosion. Only quick and decisive action by all layers of government, federal, state and local government can save the country.

May God bless Nigeria our country. May God bless our president Tinubu, our governors and all those who have willingly sought leadership positions of our country and have been honored with such huge responsibility. May He give them the wisdom, and prick their conscience and sensibilities if they still have any left, to do the right thing for the long suffering, long abused, long deprived Nigerian masses. If they fail to do so, they must be prepared for the spontaneous ire and rage of the people that is likely to sweep them off their exalted position of power.

A word they say is enough for the wise. The clock is ticking and the day of reckoning is literarily at hand.

08/01/2024
Governor El-Rufai’s Brilliant, Yet Too Cute by Half Federalism Proposition

Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s position paper on federalism is erudite, brilliant, progressive, and actionable. Yet when it comes to federalism and decentralization between state and the local governments, it is not only too cute or too smart by half (take your pick), it reeks of hypocrisy on steroid.

While recommending total decentralization of power between Abuja and the state governors, El-Rufai proposes that a more prudent, and truly federal, option would be to let the Federation Account fund only the federal and the state governments, while the state governments should then fund and manage governance at the local level as they deem fit, and as reflected in the enabling laws that their respective Houses of Assembly shall enact to that effect. Every state can then have as many or as few local government councils as they may choose.

El Rufai wants to eat his gubernatorial cake and still have it. While he canvasses the loosening of the top-heavy stranglehold of Abuja on the states, he is not extending the same privilege to the local governments, where the state governors impose even more draconian, more autocratic, and more stifling stranglehold on their finances and administration.

Governor El-Rufai would like the governor to have their kleptomaniac fingers on the juicy honeycomb of the local government allocation to squeeze it until the Queen and worker bees are starved to death. Giving the governor the kind of monarchical power being advocated by El-Rufai will give governors, who already operate as absolute monarchies, the power of life and death at the local level.
They would have the power of the purse to punish and strangulate communities that vote for the opposition political parties. It has the potential to lead to the kind of abuse of ethnic minorities and opposition parties of the nature that characterized and eventually derailed the first republic.

Governor El-Rufai’s position on the relationship between governors and local governments runs counter to the spirit and letter of the U.S. presidential constitution, which was massively and insanely plagiarized to form the basis for the financially crippling 1999 constitution that has been foistered on our country.

Specifically, the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants all powers not given to the federal government back to the people by way of state and local government. Local governments have control over a plethora of services used on a daily basis by the citizens who vote for them in municipal elections. Among these functions are Police departments, fire departments
Emergency Medical Services, Libraries, Public works departments, Building and zoning departments,
Public Schools (K-12), Parks and Recreation, Municipal courts,
Streets and sanitation departments, roads and street departments, public safety, water sanitation,
Senior citizen programs,
Cemeteries, Housing,
Community development, and
Environmental protection.

Local governments fund their activities through property taxes on land, buildings, and personal dwellings, income from licenses, fees, state-operated businesses, federal grants, state grants, and lotteries.

The state governors can’t have it both ways, by demanding autonomy from the federal government while imposing their autocratic stranglehold on the local government. The local government, by its name and definition, is the level of government closest to the citizenry and is, by extension, the most appropriate arm to provide services to it.

True federalism, to be effective, must be systemic and all embracing from Abuja to the states and to the remotest local government in the federation. For Governor El-Rufai to advocate for anything less will be hypocrisy on steroids.

Dr. Alonge is the President of Africa-Diaspora for Empowerment & Development Inc.

He is based in Miami, Florida, USA.

05/27/2024
The Hyper-hysteria Over Prince Harry & Meghan Visit to Nigeria

There is no question in a celebrity-craze world that the visit of Prince Harry & Meghan is a big deal, especially when one adds the fact of Meghan’s Nigerian ancestry. Forty-three percent Nigerian DNA for mixed race Meghan is remarkable indeed.

However, the over-the top reception, the media hysteria, and everyone, including governors, falling over one another for a handshake and photo-op with the couple show that the colo-mentality and the racial inferiority complex which Fela sang about decades ago are still alive and thriving in our society.

Harry and Meghan gave up their royal duties and are technically not representing the British monarchy. But you couldn’t tell that given the hysteria in the social and traditional media.
Thankfully, the presidency and the foreign affairs diplomats played it just about right.

Don’t be surprised if, in the next few days, a controversy arises in Nigeria between the Igbo and other Nigerian ethnicities over which ethnicity accounts for Meghan’s DNA.

05/14/2024
Inconvenient Truths We Africans Must Tell Ourselves About the Iniquitous Global Order Which Empty Rhetoric Will Not Change

A video of our Ghanaian brother berating the U.S. for its threat to sanction Ghana for passing its anti-LGBTQ legislation is making the round on African social media and we are all applauding it as if it was the Geiysburg or the iconic MLK “I have a Dream” speech.

Our obsession with LGBTQ as our legislative priority speaks volumes about the African mindset of focusing on the mundane when the rest of the world is engaged in the race for the dominance of space and AI. It is the reason we are building mega-churches while our national economic infrastructure and manufacture crumbling. Misplaced and misguided priorities all around. Empty Aluta countia speeches and deflects the responsibility for our self-inflicted dysfunction to others.

I know I have already lost half of the audience for appearing to support LGBTQ. That’s not the point. Are we, in fact, paragon of sexual morality or morality period with the insane looting, corruption, and the inhumane pauperization of the poor by our kleptocratic political class and their crony capitalists?

The Bible tells us to remove the moral log in our eyes before pointing at the speck in others. Shouldn’t we care about putting food on the poor’s table, clothing the naked, and housing the homeless before focusing on who sleeps with who in the privacy of their adult beds so long as they are not engaged in pedophilia. By the way, the same Ghana has a video of a twelve year being sexualized and given away in marriage. Why does our culture often turn a blind eye as pre-teens are sometimes married off to septuagenarians in some of our countries? Talk about sexual and morality hypocrisy.

We Africans need to know that the world does not respect or react to empty talk unless you can back it up. Our Ghanaian brother talks the good talk about Ghanaian sovereignty and economic independence and how Nigerian and Ghanaian are the best doctors in the U.S. The question is, why are our best doctors fleeing our continent while disease ravages our land? Can we walk our talk. It is absolutely the truth which many of us can attest to, that the whiteman is no more intelligent than us. We routinely wipe them with the floor in academic grade, but the world economy is not built on your ability to regurgitate facts to score well in tests. It is built on building the system that allows intelligent, creative people to use their intellect to build things, to transform academic knowledge to technology that adds value to productivity and quality of life and into consumer goods the world absolutely depends on.

You are irrelevant to the world if you must sell your raw material to survive, if you are stuck with Stone Age farming system like your cave-dwelling ancestors did with rudimentary, back-breaking hoe and cutlass in a world where robots, AI and genetic engineering are revolutionizing food production. The world has no respect for a people nor respond to the empty word of a people who cannot do the most basic thing of adding value to their raw materials, who denigrate their own culture, their own food, their own fashion, their own language, their our religion while we embrace and serenade the foreign and worship their gods.

The Bible is very explicit about the power dynamic between the rich and the poor. Prov 22:7: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender.” Just like a poor man no matter how intelligent he is, has limited idea and voice when the family is talking money, our bravado and high valuatin talk have no meaning in the commity of nations until we put our economic and political house in order and become strategic players in the global economy and in world affairs.

The West will look the other way when the Saudi crown Prince dismembered and vaporized the American based journalist because the U.S. economy depends on Saudi oil and its sovereign wealth to survive. Biden knew his political goose was cooked as soon as the Saudis started to squeeze the global oil market with her massive power to control the supply and demand curve. He had to swallow his pride and rhetoric about human rights to visit and pay homage to the Crown Prince with the iconic fist bump the world saw on TV.

We must understand that the world economy is not the papacy. We have, in fact, just discovered that not even the papacy is squeaky clean. The world affair has never been based on morality, fairness, or justice. Even our cave-dwelling ancestors invaded, looted, plundered, and laid to waste the caves of other ethnic groups. So did the Aztecs, the Romans, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Othman Turks, the Brits, the US, and now the emerging Chinese power. The powerful always dominates and exploits the powerless. It is the law of the survival of the fittest. As it is in the animal world, it is with humans no matter our pretension of moral and intellectual superiority.

The world has always been a dog-eat-dog: the winner takes it all world from antiquity.

The story of the harmonious world in the Garden of Eden, if true, died a long time ago. Didn’t Cain kill Abel in the Garden?

We must stop talking and get to work to compete in the cut-throat world. Great speeches about how the west underdeveloped Africa (which is true, by the way) does not cut it. Masterminding our own development is the best revenge against an exploitative world.

04/02/2024
The Strengthening Naira: Poetic Justice for Greedy Speculators and Economic Saboteurs

The precipitous decimation of the value of the Naira in the past several months since the Tinubu regime came on board was driven largely by irrational and insanely greedy speculators combined with vested corrupt moneybags who had stacks of Naira in their basement and were hell bent in discrediting and undercutting the Tinubu regime by attacking our currency.

We also can not forget unpatriotic governors who were alleged to be converting their increased federal allocation into the greenback, which they stacked away in their governor residences. Their evil plot and greed caused the poor masses and the middle class so much grief with galloping inflation pricing them out of basic consumer goods like bread not to talk of critical commodity like cement whose price went as far as above 12,000. It also did tremendous damage to the Tinubu regime with shouts of “ Ebi npawa” we are hungry rendering the land. Even one of his most ardent supporters, Fuji maestro Wasiu Ayinde (aka Kwam 1), even jumped on the critic wagon.

It is, therefore, poetic justice that the evil plot of these greedy speculators and economic saboteurs has now backfired. Betting against resilient, convention-busting Nigeria remains a bad bet. We have for decades befuddled conventional economists who struggled unsuccessfully to unravel the logic behind Naijanomics, which seems to defy gravity.

People might have forgotten that not so long ago, as recently as July last year, the Naira to dollar rate war was around 750. So the Naira falling as low as nearly 1900 against the dollar defied conventional economic theory. People pointed to the removal of the oil subsidies. The sudden rebound of the Naira against the dollar, with the oil subsidies removal still in place, sticks a sharp needle into that balloon.

What’s most important now for the economy’s health is stability and predictability in the forex market to allow investors to make long-term investment plans and to curtail the price gouging behavior of Nigerian retailers. The question now is will the prices that shot through the roof on the excuse of the skyrocketing dollar to Naira rate for even non-import dependent products like gari and bush meat, come down to earth now that the Naira has regained some of its lost value. Knowing our people, I am not raising my hope too high.

Another unknown is the rumors making the round about the huge minimum wage hike being proposed for federal employees. No doubt, long suffering, underpaid Nigerian workers deserve their long overdue due raise to a living wage. The risk is that if it is not properly calibrated to the ability of the state and the private sector to pay, it might lead you to inflationary pressure and instability in the forex market. The Caddoso and CBN have their work cut out for them and have many sleepless nights ahead of them.

Finally, my heart goes out to recent “japanerians” who flung their houses and other valuables assets at hugely discounted prices to finance their japaing by the lure of earning high flying foreign currencies, but many finding out that the green grass across the fence might just be fake artificial turf. The strengthening of the Naira against the dollars throws another wrench to totally mess up their calculus.

03/28/2024